Skin Hunger
by mosylu
Summary: Caitlin Snow walked out of Star Labs sixteen months ago, shortly after the particle accelerator disaster. Now Killer Frost is walking back in. She'll help them out with Captain Cold, she says, in exchange for a favor. Cisco's not behind this plan. Like, at all. The Killervibe enemies AU story that absolutely nobody asked for. Rating has changed
1. Chapter 1

The woman sat in the middle of the cortex, legs crossed, hands cupped around her knee. Her full-length white wool coat was buttoned all the way up, so all that showed underneath were her tall stiletto-heeled white boots. The only spots of warmth were her honey-colored eyes and the tinge of red in her hair. Even her mouth looked pale and chilly.

It was August, and Cisco Ramon felt sweaty and overheated just looking at her. But she always wore stuff like that. Like she was the Snow Queen or the White Witch or something.

He said to Barry Allen, "Are you _actually crazy._ "

"Nice," the woman said.

Still to Barry: "Weren't we fighting her last month?"

"Sitting right here," she said.

Cisco pointed, still without looking at her. "Uh-huh. Killer Frost. Sitting right here in Star Labs. Without handcuffs. I say again: have you lost your mind?"

Barry, in his Flash suit with the cowl up, said, "Wait. No. Wait. She is here. And she hasn't done anything to either one of us."

"Yet."

"I think it shows good faith. She says she has a proposal for us, what would it hurt to listen?"

"A lot," Cisco muttered. "But sure. Your funeral." He dropped into his chair and made a production of checking all the perimeter alarms (damn, how had she gotten past those? he needed to ask her - no, no, he didn't, she'd probably lie) and studying the feeds for anybody sneaking in while she distracted them. Killer Frost had never historically worked with anybody, but given that the history of metahumans in Central City was about a year and a half, that didn't count for much.

Barry crossed his arms. "So, Killer Frost. Go ahead. Let's hear what you have to say."

She got to her feet, strolling around the cortex like it was her home base, not theirs. Her heels clicked on the floor. "I hear you've got a little Captain Cold problem. I think I can help."

Barry had to turn as her path took her behind his back. "Oh? How could you help?"

"Hmm," she said. "Let's see. A metahuman who controls and manipulates cold? Wow. What possible advantage could I have against that cold gun?"

"And what happens if Captain Cold brings along his buddy Heatwave?"

Behind them, Cisco grimaced. Barry was trying to do tough guy. It was a dismal failure. Barry didn't tough-guy very well.

"Oh, even better. Frankly, Flash, I'm your best option."

Cisco crossed his own arms as she paused in front of the workstations, and leveled a glare at her. She didn't seem to notice.

"And what do you get out of it?" Barry asked.

She picked up a to-go cup from Jitters, still almost full. She held it for a moment, smiling to herself. The outside of the cup slowly frosted over. She set it down. "A favor."

"No deal," Cisco said. "Bye now."

"Wait," Barry said. "Um. Ms. . . . Frost, ma'am? Can I confer with my colleague?"

Her mouth twisted. "Go ahead." She strolled across the room and stood in the doorway of Cisco's lab, examining his work table. It was cluttered with tiny gears and wrenches and a little portable welding torch, plus his safety goggles, tossed on top of the mess when she'd walked in. He tried to remember if he was working on anything she especially shouldn't know about.

"Cisco," Barry said through his teeth.

Cisco cut him off. "You know what, dude? I have a little Admiral Ackbar, in my head, yelling, 'It's a trap.' And I'm inclined to trust the Admiral."

Barry pinched the bridge of his nose through the headpiece of the suit. "She's got a point. We're barely making headway against Captain Cold. If we want to capture him, we're going to need help."

"Granted, but not from her." He popped the top off the Jitters cup and showed Barry the frozen-solid block inside. "This was a hot caramel macchiato before she walked in."

Barry looked at it mournfully. "Yeah, I know how her powers work. And she's right; she has a huge advantage against Captain Cold."

"And you. Six weeks ago, she sno-coned your zippy ass. Did you forget?"

He rubbed the back of his neck. "I wouldn't put it exactly like that."

"I had to break you out with a hair dryer, and the suit was ruined."

"Now I know why you hate her."

"I don't hate her because of that." Cisco frowned. "Okay, maybe a little. That was my favorite suit."

Barry just shook his head. "What is your deal with her? We've faced a lot worse. Why is she a sore spot for you?"

"Sore spot is putting it a little strongly, just because I don't want to join hands and sing 'Kumbaya' with a supervillain."

"Don't you think supervillain is a little - "

Cisco looked over Barry's shoulder, and his mouth fell open. "Whoaaaaa whoa! What do you think you're doing?"

She looked up from the open drawer at his desk. "I need chocolate."

He bolted for his lab. "You don't get any of my candy."

"You revoked my candy privileges?" She actually sounded shocked and a little hurt.

He snatched the funsize Krackel bar out of her fingers. "I do that when people turn evil."

Something flickered in her eyes, gone too fast to identify. "I don't remember that from the verbal contract."

"I think it's implied."

Barry said, "Cisco? A word?"

Cisco glanced at him, and then back at her. He pointed at the open drawer. "Close it. And stay out."

With her eyes narrowed, she shut the drawer.

He stormed off, feeling stupid and petty but goddammit. If anybody lost candy privileges, it was Caitlin Snow.

His friend stared down at him, arms crossed. "How does she know about your candy drawer and since when did she have privileges?"

Cisco crossed his arms, too, scowling at nothing.

She answered the question. "I used to work here."

Barry wheeled around to stare at her. "At - at Star Labs?"

She lounged against the door between Cisco's lab and the cortex, hands tucked in her pockets. She might have been narrating the evening news. "Right up until the particle accelerator explosion. That changed a lot of things."

"What did you do here?"

"She was a bioengineer," Cisco answered. "Her name was Caitlin Snow."

"It still is," she snapped, straightening up. "You're the one who came up with Killer Frost, Cisco. Don't think I didn't realize who thought of that."

Their eyes met. Hers burned with cold rage. He swallowed.

Barry broke the silence. "Okay. Um. So - if we agree to your terms - "

Cisco twitched.

" _If_ ," Barry reemphasized. "Then what's the favor?"

She tapped her fingers on her pocket. "One I'm not going to tell you about. Not until you owe me."

"Shocker," Cisco muttered.

"Right. Well. Um." Barry scratched his cheek. "We're going to have to think about this."

"Take all the time you need," she said, and headed for the door. "Let me know."

"Wait. How do we find you?"

She turned, but it wasn't Barry she looked at. Instead, her eyes found Cisco. "Try looking."

* * *

Caitlin left Star Labs, feeling the weight of their gaze between her shoulder blades. It had been a gamble coming here, but not that much of a gamble. She was pretty sure they had a cell all ready for her, and the way things were, she would have been just fine going in there tonight. If she knew Cisco, either it blocked her powers somehow, or he'd souped up the heating to maintain temperature equilibrium no matter what she did.

Given that even Caitlin didn't know how to completely block her powers after living with them for eighteen months, the cell could probably double as a sauna.

She had to take a shaky breath at that thought. All that steam heat, pressing down on her skin, soaking in - _Don't._

She took the long way home, walking instead of taking the subway. The sun was setting, the concrete releasing the heat of the day, and _oh_ it felt good. She practically salivated at the sight of the heat waves shimmering above the street. Summer had never been her favorite season, but that had changed in the past year and a half. A lot had changed.

It was full dark by the time she turned onto her own street, a heavy hot dark like a blanket. She stood waiting for the light to change, watching the bakery across the street. They were closed, but someone was there, cooking bagels and donuts for the next day. Steam billowed against the windows in clouds. When they briefly parted, she watched the baker wipe sweat away from his forehead, and envy shimmered over her skin.

The light turned, and she started across the street.

Somebody leaned out his car window, making kissy noises. "Hey, baybeeeee. Whatcha got under that coat, baybeeeee? You gonna show me?"

Annoyance and revulsion crawled chilly over her shoulders and down her spine. She turned to look at him, knowing her eyes were glowing blue.

He threw himself back into his seat. "The fuck!"

His passenger smacked the back of his head. "I tol'you shut up! You leave _her_ alone or she'll freeze your goddamn nuts off."

She smiled to herself and kept walking. If there was one thing she loved about the cold in her veins - and only that one thing - it was the way she could walk through the city any time of the day or night and know she was safe. There was something about striding down her street, head up, after a lifetime of making sure she never walked alone, or if she did, she had her mace in her hand, ready to whip up and spray into someone's eyes.

It was positively intoxicating, being the most dangerous person on this block.

Her apartment was a tiny studio on the top floor of a four-story walkup. No A/C, and the windows faced full west. She paid half what the rest of the building did for the inconvenience, for the way the sun broiled the room and the heat rose from every other apartment in the place.

She'd've paid four times that much.

She walked in, froze the door locks behind her, and went to the kitchen to fill the kettle. She always had water in the kettle. She hovered over it, trying not to drag the heat out of the slowly boiling water, because that would make it take longer. She'd learned that the heat she got from actually drinking hot tea or soup lasted longer than what she took in through her skin. But it was hard sometimes.

She hadn't been able to resist that coffee cup at Star Labs, for instance. It was better she'd given in, because the heat from that was how she'd managed to walk out of there with her laissez-faire mask still in place.

 _If,_ the Flash had said, and Cisco right behind him with his face saying, _No._

The cold gnawing at her stomach flared out, and she pressed her hand to the side of the kettle for a moment - just a moment. The slow-rising whistle faded into silence. She swore and pulled her hand away, shivering.

Finally, the kettle clicked, and she poured the water over the teabag she had waiting in a cup. She picked up the cup and the ceramic burned against her skin. She let out a moan of pleasure, standing there in her tiny, stifling kitchen. Heat flowed into her palms, up her arms, to her core - _Crack_.

She looked down into the cup, knowing what she'd see, because the cold had done this before.

The tea was frozen solid, a block of brown with a teabag caught in the middle like a fly in amber. The cup itself had cracked in two places from the plunge in temperature and the sudden expansion of the water as it froze. She sighed deeply and put the whole thing in the garbage. Then she took down another cup, added another teabag, and filled it.

Holding it with both hands (no, don't pull, _don't pull_ ) she took a gulp, and though the water in the cup was still near boiling, it cooled to lukewarm almost instantly in her mouth. She took another gulp, bigger, and this one was still warm when it slid down her throat. It wasn't quite as good as body heat, but then, nothing was.

She pressed the mug to her breastbone, soaking in the heat (don't pull) and went to the closet, which held an array of heavy coats from Goodwill and a stack of cardboard boxes. She opened the first one and surveyed the contents - pill bottles. She fished around until she found the ones she needed, and counted them.

The dose she'd taken before she'd gone to Star Labs hadn't lasted as long as it should have. She rattled a pill bottle, calculating how long it would last if she took them more often. She'd already increased the frequency twice in the past two months. Was the cold growing hungrier or was her body building up a tolerance? Or both?

If she went on like this, her overburdened liver would fail. She knew that. She worried that her lack of appetite was the beginning stages, even though it was really probably because she drank so much tea all the time that her stomach was always full of that. She'd lost twenty pounds since the explosion. Far too thin, especially for somebody trying to conserve body heat. She forced herself to eat nuts and cheese and candy when she had no appetite and avoided looking in mirrors.

She put her hand in her pocket and pulled out a miniature chocolate bar. Krackel - her favorite. Cisco didn't like the texture, but he bought them anyway because he knew she'd dig around in the drawer until she found one.

Probably he'd just bought them out of habit. Or that it was part of the mixed bag.

She thought of the way he had looked at her. The way he hadn't smiled, when he'd always had a smile for her. The skepticism - the anger - in his eyes.

"I'm not a villain," she said out loud.

She believed that. Most of the time. What did it matter if anybody else did?


	2. Chapter 2

(A/N) I stole Emil Hamilton from Smallville, because I always liked the character and thought he was criminally underused on that show. According to the Smallvile Wiki, he's even working at Star Labs after the show! If a different one.

* * *

 _16 months ago_

"Cisco!"

He turned. "Hey, Emil."

Dr. Emil Hamilton's face looked like a pile of wrinkled laundry, all creases and shadows. Of course, everybody looked that way these days. Sometimes Cisco didn't even recognize the man in the mirror.

The doctor managed a smile for him. "Are you on your way out?"

"Just going to say goodnight to Caitlin, and then, yeah, I'm vamoosing."

"I'll walk with you."

Though the past two months had been morning-to-night cleanup, the halls of Star Labs still smelled like smoke or worse, the walls stained and cracked. Every so often, Cisco's feet kicked a bit of grit or a pebble of concrete. They passed a hallway cordoned off with acid-yellow caution tape, warning that nobody was allowed down there. Cisco didn't need the warning. He'd staggered out of that hallway the night of the explosion, two months ago. Of the three people who'd gone running for the pipeline, he was the only one who had come back under his own steam.

To get his mind off that, he asked, "How is she today?"

The doctor looked at him over his glasses. "You mean, since lunchtime?"

Cisco shrugged.

"Hmmmmm. Well. . . ."

He went tense. "What? What is it?"

"It could be nothing, but we saw some activity this afternoon - brain waves, pulse."

"Really?"

"Don't get your hopes up too high. Coma patients often have variations in their levels without it meaning anything. Just blips."

"Blips are more than you had."

"Mmm." Emil frowned. "We're also getting the temperature fluctuations again."

"Well. Blips. They don't necessarily mean anything, right?"

"When they're the reason we removed her from Central City General, I'm inclined to pay attention."

"Anyway, I thought you'd managed that, with the new meds."

"I thought so too."

"What's causing them?"

"Hell if I know." Emil pushed a hand through his greying curls, then put it out to stop Cisco in the middle of the corridor. "Listen, I have to be honest with you."

Cisco's stomach went tight. "What?" Those blips - were they bad blips? Dives instead of rises? He didn't know from brain waves, what was a good brain wave?

But Emil said, "I'm going back to Starling."

"What? When?"

"Within the month. The medical school at SU has an opening for an adjunct professor, and they offered it to me. I'm taking it with both hands."

"But - Caitlin! And Dr. Wells! And - the other guy!" The other guy had a name. He was pretty sure about that. He just wasn't clear on what exactly it was right now. "They're your patients! How can you just run out on them?"

"I'm not the only doctor here."

"You're the head of Bioengineering."

"Which doesn't exactly give me special expertise in dealing with coma patients, or spinal cord injuries." Emil frowned briefly. "Not that he's let me examine him."

Cisco waved that away. "They need you."

"You're talking as if Harrison Wells can't bring in the best in the business. They'll be fine."

"But - but - "

"I need to look after myself right now. I'm lucky that anybody wanted me after being involved with this." He waved a hand, generally indicating Star Labs.

"You do good work here."

"I did good work here. And it might yet save my professional reputation, if I go on to do good work somewhere else, and soon." Emil put a hand on his shoulder. "Cisco, you're a brilliant young man, a natural inventor and engineer. I know your academic background isn't, well, typical. But Harrison Wells isn't the only boss who will ever want you. Star Labs is in its death throes, and you need to be careful you don't go down with it."

Cisco jerked out of his hold. "I don't run out on people when they need me."

"If you ask me, Harrison Wells doesn't need anyone."

Cisco turned his back and started toward the cortex, where they had the two hospital beds set up. Emil didn't know what he was talking about. Harrison Wells had shot for the stars and run headlong into a supernova. From where Cisco stood, he was the neediest person around.

The cortex was quiet and still, except for the muted beeps of the medical machinery. Cisco paused at the end of the first bed. "Yo, man. How's your day going? Good? Yeah. Mine too." He patted the skinny foot under the blanket and, the niceties observed, went on to the second bed.

The woman in it lay still and pale, covered with a snowy white sheet and blanket. Her skin almost blended into them, and her lips were chapped and colorless. The only warmth seemed to come from the tinge of red in her hair.

"Hey," he said softly. "Me again. Just wanted to say goodnight before I left." He settled into his usual chair next to her bed with a sigh. "They were working on section H today and that vending machine is toast. I mean, I don't think we'll even get any parts out of it. But, hey, I did manage to rescue some of those weird candy bars you like, so, here." He set a ziploc bag on the cart with the heart monitor. "They're kind of - melted? They look warped. But that's okay, right?"

He fiddled with a wire, then let go of it in case it controlled her oxygen or something.

"Oh, get this! Hot Julio - you remember him? my brother's friend - well, he invited me to his housewarming party. I said yeah, because hey, party. And also, hey, Hot Julio. Plus, probably, his cousin Sexy Gabriela. So, you know, crossing my fingers."

He was lying. He wasn't going to that party, and Hot Julio and Sexy Gabriela might as well have been mannequins in a store for all the interest Cisco felt in either one of them right now. (He did wonder a little if Dante had been behind the invite. Though that would mean Dante was thinking about somebody besides himself for once, so maybe the world really was coming to an end.)

But it was the kind of chatter that always made her smile, crinkling up her nose at him, and she would always remember to ask him on Monday how the party had been. And if he did have something to report, Ronnie would crow with delight and high-five him and ask for all the nasty details. Sometimes he would even make things up just for that.

Tears rose up in his throat. Cisco rested his forehead in his hand. "I'm sorry. I can't - I'm trying to be - but." He pressed his fingers into his eyes. "Everything's so fucked, Cait." He rubbed his hands over his face. "And I'm saying this to a woman in a coma, whose last memory is - " He gulped and fell silent.

After a moment, he reached out and covered her hand with his. "It's gonna suck when you wake up. I know that. It's going to be so fucking rough. But I'm here, okay? And I - " He gulped in air. "I need you. Maybe that's selfish, but I really, really do. So, wake up already. Let's get it over with."

He paused. If the movies had taught him anything, this would be the moment that her fingers would twitch, that her heart monitor would speed up, that her eyelashes would flutter -

Nothing. Her fingers stayed still, her heart monitor steady, and her lashes motionless.

He frowned and rubbed his thumb over her knuckles. Jesus, her hand was cold.

He got up and went poking around the shelves that Emil had brought in when it had been transformed into a makeshift med bay. The faint whir of rubber wheels on the newly installed ramps alerted Cisco to the new person in the room. He turned. "Dr. Wells. Hey."

"Good evening, Mr. Ramon," Wells said.

He gestured randomly. "Just looking for a blanket for Caitlin. She's really cold."

"If I'm not mistaken, you'll find a few extras over by Mr. Allen."

Right. That was the other guy's name. Allen. Barry Allen. "You think his family would be okay with that?"

"Miss West seems to be a very generous young woman. I'm sure she'd be fine with it."

Cisco poked through the stack of blankets, which seemed like a lot considering they were mostly all folded up on a chair. But the Wests were always bringing things in. Barry's things, Iris insisted, like a red mug with little feet that was kind of cool in a dorky way, or a stack of comics that Cisco borrowed sometimes to read.

"And how is our Mr. Allen tonight?"

"Looks about the same to me."

"Mmm." The sheet was a little wrinkled where Cisco had patted his foot earlier. Wells reached out and twitched it straight.

Funny how he always paid more attention to Barry than he did to Caitlin, Cisco thought. Of course, maybe it was easier for him, somehow. He hadn't known Barry before the explosion. It was hard as hell for Cisco to see her lying there - how much harder would it be if he knew it was his fault?

Not his fault, Cisco reminded himself. It was a thing that had happened. Wells felt responsible for it because - well, of course he did, the particle accelerator had been his baby. But it wasn't his _fault._

As if responding to his thought, Wells said quietly, "Things don't always work out like you expect them to, do they, Mr. Ramon?"

"Nope."

"I'm sure you've heard the news? That Dr. Hamilton is leaving us."

Cisco gripped his elbows. "He told me." He scowled.

"It's hard to blame him, you know. He, and all the others, are really just doing what they feel is right."

"Well, I'm not leaving."

"No? You'd have a number of opportunities, I'm sure. You're quite gifted. You know I've always thought so."

Cisco's stomach warmed at the praise, as it always did. "Sure, yeah. But - " He forced a grin. "So many things to fix, right? I've got enough stuff here to play with until the end of time." Longer, if his coworkers kept peacing out at the rate they were going. Soon it would be just him. And Caitlin.

Wells gave a dry laugh. "Certainly you do. Well. It may be selfish of me, but I'm glad to hear it." He wheeled over and studied Caitlin's still face for a moment, then peered at the monitors. "Hmmm," he said to himself.

"What?"

"Oh. Oh, nothing. Just a few unusual temperature readings. Like the ones when we first moved her."

"That's a thing today, I guess."

"Hopefully Dr. Hamilton will get it all straightened out before he moves back to Starling City."

"Here's hoping."

"I'm going to go home and get some sleep. You should do the same, Mr. Ramon. Tomorrow's another long day."

"Aren't they all," Cisco said. "But. Yeah. Soon probably."

Wells left with a whir of wheels, and Cisco shook out the blanket. He was draping it over her when footstep made him look up. "Hey, Justin."

"Hey, Cisco."

He bumped fists with the night nurse, a wall of a guy with spiky black hair, a face like a cliffside, and extraordinarily gentle hands.

"How's she doing tonight?" Justin asked him. "Nice blanket on there."

"She seemed cold. Her hands, I mean."

"I checked in with Dr. H just now and he said they saw some temp dips. I'll make sure she doesn't freeze to death."

Cisco smiled at him. "Thanks, man. Hey, new bracelet came in?"

Justin held up his wrist, showing off a paracord bracelet with a medic alert plate that informed the world of his diabetes. "Sweet, right? Laser-engraved plate."

"Nice. You gonna climb Mount Everest now?"

"Next vacation."

Justin was an okay dude. They'd traded phone numbers and Justin sometimes texted him a status update in the middle of the night for Cisco to read in the morning. He did the same for the Allens. Cisco knew that if Caitlin did wake up, Justin would let him know first.

"Have a good night," Justin called out, bending to check something on Barry Allen's monitors.

"Yep, you too."


	3. Chapter 3

When Cisco got there at 7 am, the parking lot was empty except for Justin's car.

It had been a bad night. He'd given up on sleep about two hours before and just spent an hour drinking coffee and watching some stupid rerun that he couldn't even remember anymore before he dragged himself into the shower.

Neither coffee nor shower had done much good, but he was here, right? He was upright, his eyes were open. The way his life was going these days, he had to count that as a win.

His phone buzzed, and he pulled it out. His friend Luci, he realized, checking to see if he was coming to Hot Julio's party. He'd have to come up with a good excuse. Luci had been bugging him about getting out more for the past few weeks.

Frowning at his screen, he swung his ID badge at the door. When it whooshed open, he kept walking without looking and fell headlong over something. His breath _oofed_ from his lungs when he hit the floor, and his phone flew out of his hand and hit the wall with an ominous crack.

Awww. Awww damn. He'd lost a phone the night of the explosion - his provider was going to be really cheesed about this -

But what had he tripped over?

Cisco rolled over, flexing his scraped hands, and stared what had blocked his way into the lab.

It was a huge lump, frosted over, mist slowly rolling off it. A puddle of water spread across the floor from underneath. Cisco tilted his head this way and that, trying to work out what it was supposed to be. He could see something that looked kind of like - a hand?

And - arms - and legs - and -

He let out a strangled shriek and threw himself backward down the hall.

There was a frozen body huddled in the west hallway of Star Labs.

He panted, heart thundering. Was this a joke?

Okay. Okay, maybe some poor homeless dude had climbed the gate, figuring Star Labs would be a good place to come in from the cold. But how had he frozen to death inside? And he looked literally frozen. Frozen solid, then frosted over, coated with ice. How did that even happen?

Something silver glinted on the corpse's wrist. Cisco's stomach tightened up. He leaned forward, swallowing bile, and gave the metal a quick swipe with his thumb.

A MedicAlert bracelet. Laser-engraved, on a paracord bracelet.

"Wh - Justin?"

The metal slowly frosted over again.

"Fuck," Cisco said numbly. "Oh - God. Oh - " His coffee came up, retched into the puddle of water from Justin's frozen corpse.

"Fuck," he said again, wiping his mouth. "What the hell - "

Then something else occurred to him. "Oh my god," he whispered. "Caitlin." He scrambled to his feet, sneakers slipping in the water and the vomit. He ran for the cortex, heart in his throat. "Caitlin! Caitlin!"

He had no idea what had happened here but if it had done that to Justin, a fully awake and healthy grown man, then a comatose woman didn't stand a chance.

Caitlin's empty bed was a wreck, all the blankets and the top sheet pulled off and gone. Ice crusted her machinery, the wires dangling, water dripping off the ends. Sparks popped every so often. Cisco spun in place. "Caitlin!" he shouted. "Caitlin!"

"Mr. Ramon? Cisco? What is it?"

"Oh, god, Dr. Wells," Cisco babbled. "Justin's - he's just - and Caitlin's _missing_ \- "

Wells went white, and his eyes shot to the other bed. Some of the color returned when he saw Barry whole and unharmed. Then he looked at Caitlin's bed. "My god."

"Did you see Justin? What happened? Oh, my god!"

Wells put a hand on his wrist. "Cisco, you need to calm down."

"Caitlin's missing - we need to call the cops or something - " He laced his fingers together on the crown of his head. "We - Jesus. We need to call the X-Files, that's the weirdest thing I've ever seen - "

"Let's have a look at the security footage," Wells said calmly. "Maybe it can tell us something."

"Security footage? W-we have security footage?"

Wells wheeled over to a monitor. "Just to keep an eye on our two patients. For their safety."

Cisco shook his head, barely able to process (okay _but_ since when did you need security footage for two people in comas, said a corner of his brain).

"You came in via the west door? Yes?"

"Uh, yeah. Yes."

"Now, security records show the previous access to that door was three in the morning." He tapped a few keys and a quad-split screen came up, showing the cortex and three of the hallways. Wells adjusted the time, and the screens jumped and flickered.

A little over four hours ago by the timestamp, Caitlin slept, still and quiet. Something buzzed in Cisco's ears. Where was she? What had happened to her?

This couldn't be real. Caitlin couldn't be gone.

 _That frozen corpse._

On the screen, Justin, warm and alive, paced through the cortex. He checked Barry first, adjusting a dial, writing in his chart. Then he went and did the same for Caitlin. His hand caught the edge of the blanket Cisco had laid over her earlier, and tugged it crooked. He pulled it back, smoothing it down over her shin, and then stowed the chart and left the room for a moment.

Caitlin turned her head slightly.

Even in his panic, Cisco's heart leapt. "Wait - did you see that?"

"Shhh," Wells murmured.

"But - look, again. She moved. See?" Maybe she was awake. Maybe - maybe she'd been able to run from whatever had done that to Justin, and she was hiding out somewhere safe.

"I do see," Wells said.

Her forehead crinkled, and a wild bubble of laughter welled up in Cisco's chest. Trust Caitlin to scowl upon waking up from a coma. She was a complete non-morning person. There were some days she didn't do anything but growl until ten am.

He swallowed it down. This was not the time for laughter.

She rolled her head fully to the side, facing the machines, and her eyes blinked slowly open.

Cisco pressed his hands to his mouth. She was awake -

Her hand drifted up from its spot at her side. She frowned at the machines and reached toward the nearest one. She laid her hand flat on the side, over the vents. Her eyes fluttered closed for a moment.

Wells changed the angle (how many cameras _were_ there in the cortex?) and zoomed in. "What is that? Do you see?"

Something was creeping out from her hand. The machine stuttered, its screens flickering. Cisco squinted. "Is that - "

"Frost," Wells confirmed.

"That - that's impossible."

"Impossible is largely a matter of opinion, Mr. Ramon."

Before Cisco could respond to that, he got distracted by the sight of Justin on the screen, rushing into the cortex, apparently responding to whatever noises went along with the flashing machines.

"Oh, and there's Mr. Yazzie." The skin around Wells' eyes tightened.

Justin checked briefly at the sight of Caitlin, clutching the frosted machines. Then he pulled out a penlight and approached the bed. His mouth moved as if he were saying her name, trying to get her attention.

She turned from the machines, and Cisco let out a strangled noise. "Her eyes - what happened to her eyes?"

They weren't brown anymore, as they had been just a few moments before. They were pale, pale blue, so light they almost -

No, that had to be a trick of the camera.

Justin dropped the penlight and stepped back, face slack with shock. Caitlin rocked forward in bed, her hands shooting out to grab his wrists.

He cried out and yanked his hands away, cradling them against his body. His skin looked blistered, with little blackened patches. As if he'd been burned.

Caitlin panted, something feral and animal in her face. Her hands shot out again, and Justin dodged. She lunged, overbalanced, fell out of the bed and onto the floor, dragging all the covers with her. She pushed herself up and grabbed for Justin again.

He scrambled backward, and his heel caught against a taped-down wire. He went down hard on his butt, and Caitlin's hands wrapped around his ankle. He kicked hard, and she reared back. He scrambled to his feet and ran unevenly from the cortex, favoring the foot that she'd snagged.

But she was on her feet too, dragging blankets and sheets behind her in a flapping cascade. It should have looked silly, but somehow it reminded Cisco of a vampire's cloak. She scrambled after him, stumbling, weaving, but fast, so fast.

Wells switched cameras and found the feed for the west hallway, where Cisco had found the body. Justin lurched down the hall, fingers scrabbling in the breast pocket of his scrubs. He couldn't seem to get ahold of his ID card, and when he did, he dropped it, and fell to his knees, clawing at the ground to pick it up.

But she'd caught up to him by then. Her hand came around his neck from behind. Justin's mouth stretched wide in a scream, silent on the monitors. He clawed at her hand. It was so small on his neck, he should have been able to pull free, but he couldn't. How horrifically strong was she? What was she doing to him?

White patches began to crawl out from under her hand, spreading up his throat and down his chest, following by blackness. Justin fell to all fours, gasping. She pressed her other hand to his back, kneeling over his huddled body on the floor. She threw her head back, teeth bared, and mist roiled in the air around them.

It condensed on Justin's skin, turning to frost, hardening into ice.

Her eyes glowed blue.

When Justin was no more than the frozen block of ice that Cisco had tripped over, she yanked her hands off him, shattering the ice. She sat hunched over the body, her shoulders heaving, for at least a minute, like an animal hunched over its prey. Then she picked the ID card off the floor, pulled the blankets and sheets around herself, and rose to her feet. Stepping over his body, she unlocked the door and walked through it, out into the night.

Wells turned off the feed. They sat in stunned silence for a minute.

"Mr. Ramon. I'm - I'm so very sorry."

By rights, Cisco shouldn't have had anything left to puke up.

* * *

The police were called, some story fed to them. Not the real one. Certainly not. Cisco answered questions dully. He'd found the body. He didn't know what had happened. No, he didn't know who or what could have done that.

He really, really didn't.

As the police left, Iris rushed in. "Barry! Barry!"

"Mr. Allen is fine, Miss West," Dr Wells said.

She didn't take his word for it, but hovered over Barry for about ten minutes, hands fluttering over his face and his arms and his chest until she'd gotten confirmation that everything was where it was supposed to be. Then she sat down with a thump. "What happened?" She looked around and noticed the wreckage of Caitlin's bed, the ice-coated machinery that had been unplugged and stood thawing, far away from other wires. Her eyes went wide. "What happened?" she repeated.

Cisco looked at her helplessly, then at Dr. Wells, who shook his head ever-so-slightly. No. Iris shouldn't know either. It would only worry her.

Cisco looked at Barry in sudden concern. What if he woke up as some kind of monster too?

What kind of weapon could defend against that?

Iris touched his arm. "Cisco, right? What happened in here? Where's your friend?"

"There was an - " Cisco gulped. "An accident. She's gone."


	4. Chapter 4

Cisco worried a scrap of red suit polymer between his fingers as he finished his story. "She killed two more people that we were sure of. A woman on her way to work and some poor homeless vet. Frozen solid like Justin."

"What do you mean, that you're sure of?" Barry asked. He'd changed out of his suit and back into regular clothes, and he sat on the end of Cisco's work desk, eyes fixed on his face.

Cisco shook his head. "You missed it, man, but the winter before last, it was bad. Just, like, bitter cold clear through to April. I tracked it, and there were a lot of cases of hypothermia and freezing to death. They even ran a report on it in Iris's paper - you know, before it was Iris's paper. I don't know how many of them were her - Killer Frost, I mean, not Iris - or the winter. They stopped around springtime. I thought maybe she'd left town." He looked down at his hands and said very quietly, "Or - or died."

He didn't want to admit that he'd hoped that.

A little bit.

"Anyway, you know the rest. Robbing pharma companies, selling the drugs - "

"Are we sure she's selling them?"

"What do you think, she's taking them all herself? She'd be a human maraca."

"Why didn't you tell me any of this before? The first time I went up against her?"

Cisco tossed the little scrap of polymer away. "I told you what you needed to know, man. I told you she had cold powers, that she'd killed people. How would it help to know her whole life history?"

"I don't know, just, I wish I had! As your friend."

Neither of them mentioned the elephant in the room - that Wells hadn't said anything either.

Barry's face crunched up with concern. "Look. Cisco. I can tell that this was bad for you."

"You think?"

"But, um, you're pretty close to it. Like. Emotionally. We've dealt with a lot of metas who can't control their powers. And that's what this sounds like to me. I mean, we've helped others."

"She's not asking for our help controlling her powers. She just has this 'favor' that she wants - "

"Did you seriously just air-quote that?"

"And she won't tell us what it is. For all we know, it's an attempt to get a weapon out of us. She doesn't seem to be having a problem with her powers, anyway."

"You mean because she hasn't killed anyone in over a year."

"That we know of."

Barry rubbed his hand over his hair. "I think someone freezing to death in August might raise a few eyebrows."

"She doesn't want help with her powers."

"You're awfully sure of that for someone who doesn't know what this favor is."

"Yep," Cisco said grimly.

Thing was, he had tried to help before.

* * *

7 months ago

This apartment block was the scariest one yet.

Some of the others had been okay. Shitty, but okay, with kids and families running through. He was familiar with places like that, like the apartments his family had lived in when he was a little kid, poor but trying.

This one was just terrifying. The chicken wire fence drooped down as if someone had run into it with their car, and he was pretty sure the gate hadn't worked in years. The walls were crosshatched with graffiti, the parking lot was about half broken-down old cars, and there was a chemical smell in the air that he really, really hoped wasn't meth cooking because he didn't feel like being in an explosion today, thanks.

He didn't know whether to hope she lived here or hope she didn't.

He'd forgotten his gloves. He dug his hands into his pockets, doing his best to look tough and mean, like someone who might have spent their teen years in a gang instead of Robotics Club and Mathlympics. _You know the Flash, you know the Flash,_ he thought. It wasn't much comfort, because he'd still have to get ahold of Barry, and Barry right now was kind of distracted. But it was sort of like a security blanket.

Also, he'd made sure to dig out his crappiest coat and jeans. No point in standing out around here, any more than a stranger usually did.

Trouble was, the reason they were his crappiest coat and jeans were because they were worn thin with age, and the bitter wind bit right through. He fisted his hands in his pockets, dancing subtly from foot to foot. He'd pulled all the strings he had, called four or five dozen friends of friends, and followed any number of rumors. Maybe this one would pan out.

Just when he'd resigned himself to leaving a note on the door, like he had at about seven or eight other places this week, he spotted her.

She moved like a ghost in her white coat. She wore thick mittens, a bulky hat. In the cold snap that had hit the city, she didn't stand out. She might almost have been the Caitlin he knew, walking into Star Labs, grumbling about the cold and the mess on her boots, ready to shuck layers and start her day.

She checked her stride at the sight of him.

"C-Caitlin," he stuttered. "Hey."

He hadn't seen her in nearly a year. That wasn't why she looked like a stranger, though. He was pretty sure of that.

"Go away," she said in a flat voice.

"Don't you want to know why I'm here?"

Giving him a wide berth, she started up the steps. "I don't know how you found me - "

He trotted after her. "I looked."

" - but I don't care." She peeled one mitten off so she could manage her keys.

"Look," he said. "I - I know that Star Labs probably isn't your favorite - "

"Don't you dare talk to me about that place."

"We're trying to do things, okay? We're trying to help. Have you been following the news? The - " He lowered his voice, aware of the people walking past. "The Flash. The particle accelerator made the Flash, and - and others - "

She got the door open.

"Caitlin. Wait." He reached out.

She grabbed his wrist just long enough to yank his hand off her arm. "Go away."

He stumbled backwards down the steps, huddled over his wrist, his breath coming quick. "Caitlin." The narrow gap between his gloves and his coat, where her skin had touched, burned as if she'd traced it with a glowing metal rod. "We can help you, we can - "

"Help me? With what? I don't need your help. You're why I'm like this."

"I - I tried to - "

"You failed. Ronnie's dead. And I'm - this."

It was the truth. He stood trembling from more than cold, holding his wrist. "Please," he said. "You were my friend. Let me try to fix it."

"Even if you could, I wouldn't trust you to. _Friend._ Go away," she said, and in the depths of her eyes, pinpricks of blue began to glow. "Stay away."

He hated himself, but he ran.

When he got up the courage to go back a week later, the landlord told him she'd moved out that night. A week after that, the first pharmaceutical warehouse was robbed, the locks frosted over, the wall crumbled with ice running all through it.

When Barry had looked at him expectantly, he'd thought of Caitlin's eyes, glowing with blue contempt, and said quietly, "Killer Frost."

And if his friend had noticed that Cisco hadn't said it with his usual glee, he didn't say anything, and neither did Wells.

* * *

Two days after Killer Frost visited Star Labs, the Rogues struck a jewelry store.

"No," Cisco said.

* * *

A week after that, they tried to hit an armored car. Barry stopped them, but it was a near thing, and they still got away. He said, "Cisco - "

"No," Cisco said.

* * *

A bank.

"Cisco."

"Ughhhhhhhhhh."

"Would you just consider - "

"No!"

* * *

The cold gnawed at her bones. Just a few moments, Caitlin promised herself, and skimmed her hand over the lock. The tiniest percentage of degrees' difference in the keypad - from friction, from an electrical connection, from the guard's last punch-in, two minutes ago - told her the code.

The lock beeped and disengaged, allowing her into the pharmaceutical warehouse. Shrugging into her wool coat, she moved swiftly and quietly through the shelves, headed for the ones she needed. She hunched over the cabinet.

Somewhere in the warehouse, the tiniest of clicks sounded. She paused and lifted her head.

A voice rang out. "I don't know that much about crime, but it seems to me like a full-length, bright white coat might be a liability when you're sneaking around at night, especially in September."

"Maybe, but it's a look I'm committed to," she said, and started to turn.

"Aa-ah," he said. "Slowly. Hands up. Each of the darts in this gun packs enough tranq to fell a rhino."

She went still, then lifted her hands into the air and rotated slowly."Cisco," she said, staring down the barrel of the dart gun. "Well. This is a surprise. How did you hide from my heat sense?"

"Like I'm gonna tell you," he said.

She raised her brows.

"Okay, fine, I lined a cabinet with a space blanket and hid out in there."

Caitlin had a few space blankets herself, layered over her bed. The thin foil and plastic trapped nearly all heat. No wonder she hadn't sensed him.

His hair and t-shirt were damp with sweat, and his face was flushed. In her heat vision, he glowed like a beacon. She shook her head. "You're lucky you didn't get heatstroke. Or suffocate."

"Not your problem, Killer Frost."

Her eyes narrowed. She cast around with her heat sense, more thoroughly than the cursory check she'd done when she came in. "So where's the Flash?"

His jaw worked a little. "About this favor of yours."

"You're assuming I still need it."

His eyes widened briefly. "Do you?"

"As it happens, I do, but go on. What about it?"

"What is it?"

"Not telling."

He pressed his lips together. "Is it illegal?"

"Aren't you supposed to start with animal, vegetable, or mineral? Since we're playing twenty questions."

"I'm not the one being all top-secret classified here. Is. It. Illegal."

"Okay. Fine. No, it's not illegal."

"Is it a weapon? Can it harm someone?"

"Anything can be a weapon. But no. That's not its intended use."

"Who does it affect?"

"Directly? Me. Only me."

"And indirectly?"

She smiled. She didn't have to answer every question in this game.

He scowled. "How long will it take?"

"I don't honestly know. An afternoon - a week - a month. I can't say."

At his look, she glared. "I'm not playing coy. I truly can't."

"And why are you coming to us for it?"

"You'll know when I tell you. Which will be after I help you get the Flash back."

He went tense all over. "How do you know he's gone?"

"Because he's not here. You are, even though you're far safer back at Star Labs, working the mikes. Where is he, Cisco?"

"He went to fight the Rogues four nights ago and he hasn't come back."

"Well, he's a big boy. Maybe he just decided to zip off to Mexico for awhile. Have a piña colada."

"Even if he didn't come to Star Labs, he'd never go this long without contacting - " He stopped.

Caitlin had her thoughts on whose name he'd been about to say, but she kept it behind her teeth. "So," she said. "We've gone from 'no deal' to 'please find my friend' in . . . what? three weeks?"

"You said it yourself. You've got one hell of an advantage against both Captain Cold and Heatwave. And this city needs the Flash."

"And my favor?"

He gritted his teeth. "Okay. If this thing takes a week, a month, a year, whatever - then you stay at Star Labs for the duration."

"In a cell?"

"Hell yeah, in a cell."

"Where I'm sure you'll study me. Take data. Test me."

"While we do your damned favor."

That would work out just fine, as far as Caitlin was concerned. "Done."

He blinked, but rallied. "Okay. Come back with me to Star Labs and we'll get started looking."

She narrowed her eyes at him. "Right now? No."

"What?"

"I'll join you there in an hour. I have something to do first."

"How do I know you won't just take off?"

"The same way you trusted me to keep standing here."

"I have a gun on you."

She flicked her fingers, and a knot of ice formed at the end of the gun. Cisco looked at it, pressed his lips together, and let it drop to his side.

She folded her arms. "I think you underestimate the value of this favor."

"I could estimate better if I knew what it was."

Oh, what the hell. She deserved to be childish right now. "That's for me to know and you to find out."

"Nice. Mature. Okay. An hour. Works for me. I've got to make some calls."

"Bye, then." She reached for the door of the cabinet again.

"Seriously? You're just gonna carry out your robbery while I'm standing here?"

"Right now, it's burglary. It's not a robbery until I threaten somebody." She looked at him over her shoulder. "That can be arranged."

He pulled his phone out. "I have a police detective's personal line, and my coordinates cued up in a text."

She rolled her eyes and dropped her hands. "Fine." She wouldn't need the medicines anyway, if they found the Flash and she could go into the cell at Star Labs. "How did you find me, by the way?"

"Took your advice. I looked. You hit a pharm warehouse at least once a month. You hadn't hit this one yet. Lucky for me, Palmer Pharmaceuticals happens to be owned by a buddy of mine, and he took it as a personal favor that I was going to stop a robbery."

She turned, her coat swirling out around her like a gunslinger's duster. "And here I thought you were just going to turn up at my favorite Starbucks."


	5. Chapter 5

Iris worried at her necklace. "I think she's late."

"She's not late. We said an hour. She's still got - " Cisco pulled his phone out. "Ten minutes."

Iris frowned, folding her arms. "We need to get going."

When he'd called her, he'd really just meant to set her mind at ease, but when she found out he was headed out on a rescue mission, Iris wouldn't hear of not going. Cisco argued a little, but his heart wasn't in it. It would be good to have backup. Even better to have a buffer between him and Caitlin, in the van on the way there.

Still, he told her, "You know, Barry will kill me for bringing you."

"Barry can just suck it up," Iris said grimly. She and Barry were still shaky after the revelation that he was the Flash and had been keeping it from her for nine months. He'd banned her from Star Labs, but Cisco had no immunity to a pair of sad eyes, and Iris knew it. "You're sure about this, Cisco? You sure we'll be safe? You're sure Barry will be safe?"

"I'm okay, aren't I?"

His tranq gun wasn't okay - she'd iced over the firing mechanism as well as the tip of the barrel and he was going to have to take it apart to even see if it was salvageable. Plus, his hands hadn't stopped shaking for fifteen minutes after Caitlin had walked away from the Palmer Pharmaceuticals warehouse.

But she hadn't turned him into a Cisco-sicle, so . . .

"It'll be fine," he told Iris, hoping he sounded like he believed it. "She wants something from us, so she's not going to freeze us solid tonight. She has to get something out of us first." Even if she wouldn't say what it was.

Cisco heaved the last box into the back of the Star Labs van (now a plain panel van; he didn't think that having their logo on the side made this a very undercover rescue mission) and shut the doors. He came around the side and found Iris with her hand on the door handle, watching the figure in white stride in from the parking lot.

"That's her," Iris said quietly.

"Yep."

"She's really going to help?"

"That's what she says."

Iris shook her head. "My _god_ , I want that coat."

"It's still summer."

"For another week. It'll be winter eventually, and style is style." Iris frowned. "But now that you mention it, she always wears it. It's got to be eighty degrees out tonight."

And humid as balls. "She says it's a look," Cisco said.

"There's committing to a look and there's flirting with death by heatstroke. Is she always cold or something?"

Cisco chewed the inside of his cheek. "I've never asked."

Caitlin stopped a few feet away. "Who's she?"

" _She_ is Iris," Iris said. "And I'll be your driver tonight. Let's go."

Caitlin climbed in the back. "Iris West? Of 'Saved by the Flash'? Don't look so surprised, I read my press clippings. This is a lot of effort for a story."

Cisco and Iris exchanged a look. "Not so much," Iris said breezily. "Lois Lane at the Daily Planet once dressed up in a Playboy Bunny outfit and jumped out of a hollow cake. At least all my clothes are on."

Caitlin settled back in her seat. "So. Where are we going? Does the hired muscle get to ask?"

"Down by the waterfront," Cisco told her.

"You know where the Flash is?"

"Pretty good guess."

"And you arrived at that guess - how, exactly?"

"What do you care?" Cisco asked.

Her eyes narrowed briefly. "It's my skin on the line too. I'd like to know that I'm not risking it on a harebrained guess."

"She's got a point," Iris murmured. She reached out and turned on the van's heater.

"Okay, fine." Cisco leaned forward and tapped a tablet mounted to the dash, bringing up a city map. "He disappeared in this area of town. I went out there to poke around and found a flash drive - "

Caitlin's brows rose. "Seriously?"

"Yeah, I know, Snart seems to have the sense of humor of a ten-year-old. And I say that as a guy who never quite made it past twelve. Anyway, this recording was on it." He tapped.

"Cisco Ramon," Captain Cold drawled out. "No need to worry about the Flash. As soon as he agrees to leave us alone, we'll let him go. If you want him to be alive when that day comes, you leave us alone too." It cut off.

"The Flash's release in exchange for the Rogues' free pass. Quite a deal. You don't think he'll agree?"

"Not a chance, the idiot," Iris said grimly. "He'll agree to anything for somebody's else's sake, but B- the Flash will indulge his damn martyr complex as long as he's the only one in danger."

"An opinionated biographer," Caitlin said. She leaned forward, careful not to brush either Iris or Cisco's shoulders. "He disappeared two and a half miles from the waterfront. What makes you think they took him there?"

"Well, listen again." Cisco reached out to the tablet, and his sleeve pulled up. She looked at his wrist, and he tugged his sleeve down quickly and focused on hitting play. "You hear that? The quality of the sound? It's sort of metallic and echoey, like they're in a large open space - "

"I don't, really, but I'll take your word for it." She studied the map again. A section was outlined in yellow. "The waterfront is a mile and a half of warehouses. Why these, specifically?"

Cisco grinned. "These here? Are condemned."

She turned her head and glared at him.

He shifted in his seat. "What."

"If you wanted to kill me, there are probably easier ways than sending me into a condemned warehouse to get crushed to death by a falling roof."

"You are not going to get crushed to death by a falling roof. Do you think the Rogues would use a place that unstable?"

"The city wouldn't condemn it because it had the wrong paint job!"

Their breath started to come out in clouds. Iris whispered, "Cisco."

"I'll be looking after you," he said very fast. "Monitoring the building. And the Rogues. Working the mikes. That's my thing, remember?" He curled his fingers into his palms to warm them. "Look, you want this favor or not?"

She let out a huff and sat back. Slowly, the clouds of their breath dissipated.

"We wouldn't be doing it like this if there was a chance it could hurt you," Cisco said quietly.

"Of course you wouldn't. Then I couldn't get your precious Flash back." She glared at the tablet. "How many warehouses are we talking?"

"About six." Cisco dug in his pocket. "I've got something here that will check them for running electricity, for - "

"No need. Drop me at the end of the row. I'll walk on down."

Cisco frowned. He'd been waiting to use that gadget. "And, what, look for a giant sign that says, 'Evil Clubhouse'?"

"Noooo," she drawled. "Look. Condemned means nobody goes in them, right? Supposed to? So any of these that my heat sense detects a group of people in, that'll be the Rogue's hideout."

"Or a homeless camp."

"Possible, but the Flash's heat signature has a sort of zing to it. I can't describe it exactly, but I know it."

Iris looked over her shoulder. "Those are big buildings. Your heat sense can detect people at that distance?"

"My heat sense can detect a mouse at that distance."

Cisco stared out the windshield at the warehouses they rumbled past, biting his tongue so he wouldn't burst out, _Holy shit, that's sweet!_ "One more," he said. "Okay, those are it. That row."

"Right." Caitlin reached out to open the door.

"Wait! You need to lose the coat."

"The coat stays on," Caitlin said.

"I'm serious. You stand out."

"You want my help or not?"

"You're going to get yourself caught."

"Because the Flash has done such a stellar job of that so far. Believe me, Cisco, I will be fine." She started to open the door again.

Cisco scrabbled in his pocket. "Wear this at least." He held up a tiny, flesh-colored device.

She dropped back in her seat and frowned at him. "What's that?"

"It's an earpiece. To keep us in touch."

"Are you going to be talking in my ear and distracting me?"

"I'm gonna warn you if the roof starts to fall in. Or if I see anything else you should know. I can hardly run the mikes if there's nobody on the other end to listen to me."

She held out her hand. He dropped the earpiece into it, careful not to brush her skin with his fingertips.

"It's two-way," he said. "And there's a tracker in it. So if you need help - "

She studied it, rolling it around her palm. "I won't need help."

"So if you need help," he repeated, "I can, you know. Come running in to save the day."

She didn't say anything.

"Put it in. See how it feels."

She tucked it into her ear. "Good."

"Good? Comfortable?"

"Yeah. Warm."

"Warm? That's not right, the battery must be - "

"It's fine," she snapped. "I just meant - not cold. That's so uncomfortable." She opened the door and hopped out, slamming it shut behind her.

Iris started driving again. They would circle the block at a reasonable speed, hopefully looking like a lost delivery van while remaining close enough to the set of condemned warehouses. "You sure about this?" Iris asked him.

Cisco watched the figure in white in the side mirror, growing smaller as they drove away. "Whatever it is, she needs that favor. Bad. She came to Star Labs to bargain for it, when I figured for sure she'd burn the place down before setting foot in it again. She'll get Barry out."

"She'd better."

When they turned the corner, leaving her behind, he fastened the tablet into the mount on the dash. It still showed the map, with a blue dot for them driving around. A tiny yellow dot moved slowly between the warehouses. "Stay close, okay?"

Iris reached out and pushed his sleeve up. A thin, shiny scar wrapped around his wrist like a cuff, not quite meeting on the underside. "What's that from, by the way? That scar? When she saw it, you got all squirrelly."

He twisted his hand out of her grasp. "You've seen it before."

"That's not what I asked."

He unbuckled his seat belt and climbed into the back, over the seat where Caitlin had been sitting, to get to his tech. He turned on the mikes. "Hey. Can you hear me now?"

Her voice came clearly through the speakers. "I refuse to act out a cell-phone commercial."

Iris snickered.

Cisco shot a look at the back of her head, then squinted at the map. "What are you doing? You're just standing there, you - "

"Shhhhhhhh."

Cisco huffed.

Iris smiled. "Whether or not we can trust her," she said in a low voice, "I kind of like her."

"Your mikes are very sensitive, by the way," Caitlin said. "In case you were wondering."

Cisco tapped the mike to mute. "Still like her?"

Iris made a face for him in the mirror, but her mouth still curled up a little.

Caitlin's voice came out of the speakers. "Middle one on the north side. Four people, one of them definitely the Flash."

Iris caught her breath. "Is he - "

"Still muted," Cisco said, and tapped the mikes on. "How is he?"

Iris called over her shoulder, "Is he hurt? How are they keeping him captive?"

"I have a heat sense, not clairvoyance. All I know is he's at normal body temperature. Going in."

"Roger that," Cisco said. "Keep us up to date." He focused his satellite feeds on the warehouse she'd mentioned, and saw her tracker dot slipping around the side. Iris turned a corner and cruised back toward the condemned warehouses, still at an under-the-radar speed.

"Okay," Caitlin murmured over the speaker. "I'm in. Shhhh."

The engine growled a little louder as Iris gave it more gas. The dot slid through the building, headed for the northwest corner.

Cisco said anxiously, "Look, just in and out, okay? We're calling the cops as soon as we've got him safe, so you don't need to - "

Mick Rory's voice said, "Who are you?"

"You're Heatwave, right? Definitely my third choice, but you'll still do."

Cisco's mouth fell open. "Caitlin? What are you doing?"

Without having to be told, Iris floored it. The tires screeched on the pavement for a moment, then caught, and they zoomed toward the warehouse.

Caitlin's voice came through, "Look, tell Captain Cold that - "

 _Pschew._

The speakers crackled, then went dead. Cisco's eyes shot to the map. The tracker dot flared and disappeared.

"Caitlin? Caitlin!"


	6. Chapter 6

Caitlin stumbled backward a step or two. The heat from the heat gun shimmered through her body, warming her to the tips of her toes for the first time since she'd woken up at Star Labs. Oh, god. Oh, _god._ That felt amazing.

Her euphoria lasted until she got a good look at herself. "You jerk," she said to Mick Rory.

He was staring, open-mouthed. "How did you - ? I shot you."

"Yes, you did, you jackass. I loved this coat."

She risked another look down at herself and almost cried. Her beautiful white wool coat now had a huge blackened patch right at stomach-level, and the rest of it was streaked with smoke and dotted with charred splotches. It looked like a marshmallow somebody had toasted badly.

Being completely warm, finally, almost made up for it. Almost. Entropy dictated that the warmth would fade, after all, and when it did, she still wouldn't have a coat.

Mick Rory brought the gun up again. Automatically, she pushed her hand out, intending to plug the tip like she had with Cisco's gun earlier in the night. But dragging the heat out of the air felt like clawing at pudding, when it was usually so easy that -

He shot her again.

Her whole sleeve charred up to the elbow. "Oh, for - " She tore her coat off and flung it at him. Even charred, all that wool was heavy, and it knocked the gun out of his hands. Or maybe he dropped it in surprise at someone surviving two direct blasts from a gun that could melt through solid steel.

She was right behind it, drawing on old self-defense classes to slam the heel of her hand into his nose. He yelped and staggered backward, and she kicked him in the groin.

As he writhed on the ground, she hoisted him over, grunting, and tied him to a pipe with the belt from her coat. "O-kay," she growled, shrugging back into it. Destroyed or not, it would preserve some warmth for her. "Like I was saying before I was so rudely interrupted. Cisco Ramon is too smart to fall for your dumb kidnap-a-friend trick a second time. That's why he sent me in. So Captain Cold is just going to have to do without - you know what?" She grabbed the heat gun from the floor, and Mick's face fell. "Never mind. I'll tell him myself. Stay," she said, pointing at him, and stormed off.

She tried to form an ice dagger, and couldn't. She tried to chill the air, and the temperature barely dipped. Her heat sense was gone too. Or . . . not gone. But terribly out of focus. It wasn't like being blind or deaf, but more like she had those dilating eyedrops in, or her ears were ringing, and working out what she saw or heard took a lot of concentration.

But - she was warm.

No, she didn't have the time to concentrate on that. She had to find the Flash. Or if she found either of the Snarts, she had to kick their asses too. (Somehow. With wobbly, unfocused powers.)

She said, "Cisco?" quietly.

Nothing.

She put her hand to her ear and dug out the earpiece. It had been a warm little presence, like a friendly mouse, and now she registered that it was cold. The heat gun must have blown it out. So - she was alone.

Okay. That was fine. She'd been alone for a long time.

She stuck it in her pocket, stopped behind a pillar and focused as hard as she could, but still, only diffuse and limited information trickled back to her. She rubbed her hand over her face, then studied the gun, working out where to hold it, where to settle her hands. Hopefully she wouldn't have to fire it. She knew what a body looked like frozen to death. She didn't particularly want to see one that had been burned to death, too.

Behind her, there was a slight scraping noise. She stepped out, gun up.

* * *

Cisco peered through the eye slit close to the top of the heat shield. Oh, he hoped it wasn't Lisa. Not only did this not do very much against the gold gun, Lisa herself was the mistake he kept making.

But it wasn't Lisa.

It was Caitlin.

For a moment, he just stared at her, his brain whirring. This had been a trap, a much more elaborate one than he'd figured on. She'd been working with them all along. Probably to get the Flash out of the way.

But Killer Frost never worked with anyone.

That they knew of.

But . . . Heatwave had shot her.

It had _sounded_ like Heatwave had shot her.

It sort of looked like it too, because her coat was all scorched and blackened and the air stank of burnt wool. But she was standing there, looking perfectly unharmed, if a little annoyed, and . . .

Why did she have the heat gun?

She lowered it. "Cisco?" she whispered. "What are you doing here?"

"Your tracker - "

"Shh!" She looked around, then glared at him.

"Your tracker went out," he whispered back, lowering the heat shield until the base rested on the floor. It was tall enough it still shielded most of his body, just in case. "And your audio feed. And I told you, I'd come to help if you needed it. He - it sounded like he shot you."

"He did shoot me. And he ruined my coat." She looked down at herself and made a face. "But, I'm fine. Sorry about your tech." She tossed a lump of warped plastic to the ground.

Cisco stared at it, stomach churning, then shook his head hard. "I don't care about the earpiece. I care - that you might not be able to get B - the Flash out."

She frowned at him. "I can handle myself just fine. Go back to the van."

"And what, sit there and wait? No, I'm here, I'm coming with." Just in case. Just in case she was improvising madly. Just in case he was Barry's only ally in this place now.

"Are you crazy? I thought you realized what this was all about."

His stomach twisted. Was this the villain monologue moment? "What do you mean, what this is all about?"

"You. They kidnapped the Flash to get to you."

"Why . . . do you say that?"

She goggled at him. "Cisco. That message? The only way Snart could have been more obvious about who he really wanted, would be if he'd laid a trail of socket wrenches and lollipops for you to follow."

"That's bullshit," he said, louder, and she shushed him again. "He wanted the Flash out of his hair."

She made an exasperated noise in her throat. "He wanted his little toymaker again."

"Hey," Cisco said. "They stole those. Okay?"

"Not the gold gun. And I know, they had your brother. But that just let them know if they twisted your arm hard enough you'd give them whatever they wanted."

It was too painfully true, so he chose to focus on the first part of what she'd said. "How did you know about Dante? Is there a bad-guy Facebook group I'm not aware of?"

"If there is, they didn't invite me." She narrowed her eyes. "You really didn't realize that."

"This has been about the Flash."

She rolled her eyes. "Oh, sure, the Flash, the Flash. Fine. Go get your precious Flash and get out of the building and let me handle the Snarts, all right? Can we both live with that?"

He set his jaw. "Sounds good. Where is he?"

A flicker of uncertainty crossed her face. "Down - there." She gestured off behind him, in the direction she'd been heading.

He frowned at her. "Okay . . . And where are Len and Lisa, in relation to that?"

"Around. I told you, I would handle them."

"Around where? You're gonna have to be more specific." He shifted his grip on the heat shield.

"They move around. Like people do."

"Don't you have that heat sense? That one that can sense a mouse?"

"Yes. Of course."

"So. Where are they?"

She huffed, then closed her eyes. "There's - somebody on the other side of - the building, and - " Her face scrunched. "Someone else - that way." She gestured. "Moving toward us. About - two thirds of the way across the building - maybe - " She put a hand to her head the way she used to when she had headaches at work.

He reached out automatically. "Caitlin - are you - ?"

Just as his fingers brushed the back of her hand, her eyes popped open, and she jumped back. And although she was the one with the heat gun and the cold powers, and all he had was a shield that didn't even wrap all the way around him, she was the one who looked terrified.

"Go," she snarled. "Go right now. Get him out. Leave."

He backed up, two steps, three. She turned on her heel and marched off in the direction she'd indicated for the second person.

"Caitlin," he said quietly.

She whipped around. "Don't _yell_."

"Caitlin, if I don't come out in - " He estimated. "In about eight minutes, Iris is going to call her - call the cops."

She went still, pressing her lips together. "Understood."

"It's just, you've got a warrant. Like a couple of them. And - "

"I told you, I got it," she said through bared teeth, and kept walking.

"That wasn't a threat," he murmured. He looked down at his fingertips, rubbing his thumb over them, and headed off in the direction she'd indicated for the Flash.

The warehouse was the big open space he'd predicted, yay him, but it was arranged in a maze of shelves and bulky plastic-draped, dust-coated shapes. The heat shield was heavy and awkward, and he thought, _Man, I should make this more portable, like, cloth based maybe? A suit? Or an umbrella?_

That tickled him a little, the thought of an umbrella, and he smiled to himself. Then he heard the low groan, and rushed around a huge machine to find Barry flat on his back on a little cot.

"Barry!"

Barry rolled his head to one side, blinked his eyes open, and smiled sweetly at him. "Heeyyyyyy Cisco."

Cisco blinked at him. He'd expected to find his friend wrapped in chain from head to toe, or something. "Uh. Hi."

He giggled. "Yes, I am."

"Oh, boy," Cisco muttered, studying the IV in his arm, then the bag hanging from a stand. "What are they pumping into you?"

"Rrrrreall' strong stuff," Barry mumbled. "Realll' - I'm so buzzed. I haven't been buzzed in almost two years, y'know that?"

"Uh-huh." Cisco propped the heat shield against the end of his cot. "Y'know what? Buddy? It's time for you to sober up."

* * *

When she heard him head off, Caitlin paused to shrug off her coat and drop it at the base of a machine. Even though it almost physically hurt to do it, she knew that losing some of the heat she'd gained would sharpen her powers, and she needed them, right now. She needed them so much.

Eight minutes, he'd said.

She couldn't go into jail. Who knew what her powers would do there?

As the warmth from the heat gun dissipated, her heat sense sharpened with teeth-gritting slowness. She double-checked, and the Flash was still back there, along with Cisco. Of the three other people in the building, one was Mick, the second was moving toward the room where she'd left Mick, and the third was about two hundred yards away from her.

She mouthed, _Damn._

She double-checked her grip on the heat gun, tried for an ice dagger one more time (no go), and huffed out a breath.

Seven minutes now.

She edged around the corner, heat gun held high, praying that Snart's back would be turned, and was met with the cold gun aimed in her direction and Snart's smirking face.

She lifted her chin. "I'd put that down."

"Great suggestion. You first."

"Do you know who I am?"

"The girl with Mick's gun, is who you are. He's not going to be pleased."

She smirked and threw every ounce of power she had into pulling heat out of the air. His breath came out in a faint cloud, and his brows rose. "Killer Frost. Although - " He looked her over. "That's not the outfit I always heard about."

Her eyes narrowed.

"So, Killer Frost," he drawled, not shifting his gun one millimeter. "What can the Rogues do for you?"

"You can come quietly."

His brows rose. "Can I?"

"Actually, what I really want is an excuse to kick your ass, but I'm on a schedule. So, make it easy on yourself, hmm?"

"You really think you could take me out?"

"Well, you've got that gun, and I've got this one. So as I see it, there are two possible outcomes. Either you shoot me with your gun, and I go," she shrugged. "Eh. Or I shoot you with my gun and you go argh, argh, argh, sizzle, pfssshhhh."

"Pfsssshhhh?"

"A little curl of smoke from your smoldering corpse."

"Very descriptive."

"I thought so."

He fired, and she ducked to the side with a gasp. The very edge of the beam caught her shoulder, and the bulk of the heat from Mick's gun was sucked away.

His mouth curled in a smirk. "What was it you said? 'Eh'?"

She smirked back. "Big mistake." She dropped the heat gun, throwing both hands out. Ice wrapped around his waist, his knees, and his ankles, and he struggled briefly before collapsing to the floor.

He swore at her.

"Watch your mouth or I'll stuff that full of ice too," she said, and picked up both guns.

With her newly regained heat sense, she checked the warehouse again, spreading her radius as far as it would go. Iris, outside with the van, but nobody with her. So, no cops yet. Cisco and the Flash, making their way toward the side entrance where she'd come in.

Mick was still where she'd left him, and the third, Lisa, was headed toward the same side entrance.

Caitlin's mouth curled up. "Oh, perfect."


	7. Chapter 7

"Why're we so slow?" Barry whined as they stumbled toward the door. "I could go a lot faster than this."

Cisco rearranged his friend's arm over his shoulders, grunting. For such a skinny guy, he was heavy, damn. "Nope, no running for you right this second, man," he whispered. "You would run into walls and it would be funny, but we've got stuff to do, bad guys to incarcerate, justice to bring. How about we walk, okay? Let's walk it off. Come on. Come with me."

"Where're the bad guys? I'll get the bad guys."

"Shhh!" Cisco grabbed his collar before Barry could take off, forcing an "urk!" out of the stoned superhero's throat. "We'll come back for them. As soon as all that shit's out of your system. How's that metabolism doing, huh? Cleaning you up? Please?"

Barry paused as if considering it, then leaned over and barfed on the floor.

"So, that's a yes." Cisco shook his head. "Dude, you are lucky I like you."

"Hey, Cisco. Having some trouble?"

He went still, then looked over his shoulder. "Lisa."

She batted her lashes. "Oh, honey, don't you remember? It's Golden Glider. That was a moment, wasn't it?"

"Yeah, it was," he said. "Which you ruined by being a terrible human being."

She sighed deeply and produced her gold gun. His stomach folded up at the sight of it. "So judgey. But so cute. I was really hoping I'd see you."

"Feeling not mutual," he said, trying to keep an eye on her and at the same time keep Barry from falling into the puddle of his own yak. How was this his life?

"Flash isn't doing all that well, is he?"

"He'll be fine once he gets it all out." Cisco patted Barry's back with a confidence he didn't feel. "So, what'd you give him? Out of curiosity."

"Enough narcotics to supply every old hippie in the Pacific Northwest." She tilted her head and watched Barry wobble like a child's top. "Maybe a little too much?"

"Nahhhhh," he said, just as Barry barfed again. "Yep, yep, better out than in."

She giggled. "Len will be so happy to see you."

"Feeling also not mutual." Something moved in the shadows, and he said loudly. "In fact, you know what, I would say that I have loved catching up with you, but I'm trying not to lie so much. So the Flash and I, we're gonna just go now, and - "

"Cisco, you adorable cupcake. We haven't gotten - " Her head flew forward as something smacked into it. She frowned and put a hand to the back of her head, then brought her hand back around to frown at the white crystals melting on her fingertips. "Snow?"

She turned, and Caitlin hit her in the face with the butt of the cold gun.

Lisa staggered backward, dropping her gun, and Caitlin hit her again. She collapsed, and Caitlin shackled her by the elbows and the knees. "Seriously, Cisco? She's like your kryptonite."

Cisco finished disassembling the gold gun. "I saw you. I was distracting her."

"How far would that have gone?" She knelt in front of Barry, avoiding the puddles. They started to frost over from proximity, the grossest sheets of thin crackling ice. "Oh, good, you vomited. How many fingers?" She held up two.

Barry said, "Um, uh, two . . . Whoa, hey, Caitlin! Are you helping us? Awesome. Where's your coat?"

She squinted at his eyes. "If they gave him what I think they did, you need to take him to the hospital."

"He'll be fine," Cisco said. "He metabolizes really fast. He'll be good to go in like five minutes."

"I can help you," Barry said. "Soon as. Soon as I get off this boat."

"Maybe ten."

Barry almost fell over Lisa. "I don't like her," he confided to Caitlin loudly. "She's very flirty and I'm pretty sure she's really into him but I don't think she's good for him."

"He's higher than the International Space Station and he knows this," Caitlin said to Cisco.

"I made out with her once." Cisco reached out and caught Barry as he swayed and blinked. "Under false pretenses."

"Keep telling yourself that, lover." Lisa's smirk was back.

Caitlin turned on her. "Shut up or I will fill your mouth full of snow."

Lisa rolled her eyes. "Who is this girl?"

"Someone I'd listen to when it comes to cold-related threats," Cisco said, but he edged closer to the hand that held the heat gun. He didn't like Lisa, but he didn't want to see her get freezer burn, either.

"Like I'm afraid of the cold."

"Oh? Why? Because of this?" Caitlin waved the cold under Lisa's bleeding nose. "Or maybe this?" She handed Cisco the cold gun and held up the heat gun.

Lisa went pale and shut up.

Caitlin turned to Cisco. "I'll go get the other two."

"Right." To Lisa he said, "On your feet. Let's go."

She pouted. "What if I don't want to?"

He cocked the cold gun and aimed it at her. "I'd say I don't want to hurt you, but actually I'd be okay with that."

Lisa glared at him as she hobbled toward the door. "I'm freezing."

"It's a warm night," Cisco said heartlessly. "You'll be fine."

Outside, they could hear sirens shrilling, getting closer. Iris stood by the van, phone to her ear. "Wait, Daddy, wait, I see somebody - Barry!"

Seeing Iris seemed to clear the last of the drug from Barry's system. "What are you doing here?" To Cisco - "What is she doing here?"

Iris's elation dissolved. "Helping you out," she snarled. "You're welcome."

"Look, I - "

"Never mind." She grabbed a paper bag from inside the van and slapped it into Barry's chest. "Eat those. Cisco, where's Caitlin?"

"Inside. Getting the others." Cisco glanced at the road and the blue and red lights speeding down it. "She needs to go soon."

Two drained water bottles, the empty wrappers from a pack of protein gels, and the paper bag swirled madly in a mini tornado as Barry took off.

Cisco looked after him. "I hope he's sober by now. They gave him some really strong stuff."

"He seemed fine to me." She took charge of Lisa. "FYI, bitch, I'm a cop's daughter and I'm really pissed off right now."

* * *

Caitlin briefly checked on Mick, swapping her belt out for more ice shackles, but she left him and ran for the other end of the warehouse. She had a bad feeling about Len.

She was right. He'd managed to roll over to a faucet stuck in the wall, turn it on somehow, and was holding his wrists under the flow of water.

"Smart," she said, turning it off. "But not fast enough."

He shook his head, his mouth curling up. "True. Tell me, Killer Frost. What reason do you have to partner up with Star Labs? Isn't the Flash chasing you down half the time?" He leaned forward a little. "The Rogues could always use someone with your talents. You don't even need a gun. We'll help you get what you need, you'll take care of the Flash, win-win. What do you say?"

"Mmmm." She tilted her head to one side. "You make some good points. I have no particular loyalty to the Flash, and God knows I'd rather Star Labs fell into the depths of the earth. Here's the thing, though." She braced her hands on either side of his head and leaned in until they were nose to nose. "After what you did to Cisco, you're lucky I don't freeze your testicles to your nasal passages."

He pressed himself back into the wall, sliding down. His nose began to redden ever so slightly, and his breath came out in frosty clouds.

"So, your offer is very kind, but that's a no."

Somehow, he retained the lazy sneer in his voice, even though it shook. "Fair enough."

A voice said in her ear, "I've got him."

She jolted away from the Flash. Len made an aborted move, and a split second later, the Flash had him by both arms. "You should take off," he told Caitlin. "The cops are here."

"And I've got warrants, I know." But she hesitated. "Weren't you - ?"

"Cisco told you, fast metabolism. Get going. I'll try to distract them."

She didn't stay to argue, because she could hear sirens whoop-whooping in the parking lot. She headed for the opposite side.

"Hey," the Flash yelled after her. "Hey, thanks."

"I didn't do it for you," she called over her shoulder.

"Yeah, I know."

* * *

The rush of wind blew through the cortex, faintly soap-scented. Cisco's suit appeared on the mannequin and Barry in the chair next to him, twirling once or twice from residual kinetic energy.

"How are you feeling?" Cisco asked, combing his hair out of his eyes.

"Like I've been drugged to the gills and held captive." He ripped open a protein bar and downed it.

"I'm sorry it took me so long, man."

"No, it's okay. You came for me."

"Well - I had some help."

Barry chugged a full bottle of water and burped impressively. "Yeah," he said. "Yeah, I remember that. Killer Frost."

Cisco avoided his eyes. "Uh-huh."

"So - we're on the hook for this favor."

"Seems like." He synced up his tablet to the monitors, and his notes appeared on the large screen.

"What exactly is it?"

Cisco added something to one of his lists. "Still don't know. But she promises that it's not illegal, it's not a weapon, and it won't hurt anybody."

"And you believe her?"

"What happened to Bright-Side Barry, who believes in the innate trustworthiness of all mankind?"

"Nothing happened to him," Barry retorted. "It's just after the way you talk about her, I wouldn't've thought you'd put much stock in any promise she made."

Cisco shrugged. "Well, I had a tranq gun on her at the time, so . . ." He let it trail off, choosing not to disclose that Caitlin had been able to spike his gun, literally, anytime she wanted throughout that whole discussion.

Barry raised his brows. "Bad-ass. Where's this all coming from?"

"Desperation, mostly."

"Mmmm. So," he said casually. "Oliver was busy?"

"What?" Cisco started rummaging for his mini screwdriver set.

"Oliver. The Arrow? Our Starling City friend, vigilante, always answers the phone when we call even if he's really grouchy about it . . . Was he busy or something?"

Aw, man, how long had it been since he'd organized his tools? This was shameful. His tata would ashamed. "Um. Probably. He's got a few things going on."

"Right, yeah, sure. That's true. And Ray? The Atom? With the suit that you fixed and the ten million nerdy in-jokes? Who sends you tech samples on a weekly basis?"

"Dude's running, like, an empire." Cisco pulled the entire drawer out and dumped it on his work surface.

Barry scooted back to avoid a wrench that clanged to the floor. "Did you even call them?"

Cisco felt his face go hot. "Look, you were the one telling me she had a monster advantage against Captain Cold. Okay? And she got you out."

"Yeah, yeah, I know. It's just interesting, is all. Considering."

"Well, maybe it was the wrong call - "

"Did I say it was the wrong call? Because from where I'm sitting it worked."

"Yeah, it did. And it's done now. So."

"Ooookaaaaay," Barry drawled, folding his arms and grinning in a way that Cisco considered really weird. "So, how's this going to work?"

"Well. She's moving in so we can do this favor for her."

"What, here? Interesting. And that's okay with you?"

"It was my condition. Especially since we don't know how long it's going to take. And that reminds me. Can you go out and get me, like, a 76-pack of Monster? I've got to add some things to her cell."

Barry dropped his arms and his weird grin. "Her what?"


	8. Chapter 8

By the time Barry came back at lunchtime the next day, Cisco had souped up the cell to his satisfaction, added temperature sensors to Star Labs' security, and promised Felicity Smoak his firstborn ("Ew, Cisco, no, I've already got Oliver to look after") to build a new file system around all the sensitive data on Star Labs' servers.

"Okay, but did you _sleep_?" Barry asked him.

"Sleep is for the weak." Cisco drained his last Monster and chucked the can at the recycle bin, where it clattered against a minor mountain of similar cans.

"And the well-rested," Barry said. "You drink any more of that crap and you're going to start hearing colors. Serious, man, couldn't you have taken a few hours' downtime?"

"I did. Two hours on the couch in the break room."

"The one with the spring that bites me in the ass every time I sit down?"

"You're sitting on it wrong."

"Okay, you felt the need for all this, but why all at once? Did you guys set an appointment time?"

"I have no idea. She could turn up in ten minutes, she could turn up tonight, or tomorrow, or next week . . . "

"Or maybe never."

"Not a chance."

"Right, the favor." Barry picked up the tablet and looked at the schematics for Caitlin's cell, shaking his head. "This is . . . Wow. I can't imagine putting one of my friends in this."

"She's not my friend."

"Yes, I know, she's Killer Frost and everything - "

"She took the heat gun," Cisco interrupted. "I've got the cold gun, but she took the heat gun. Does that sound trustworthy to you?"

Barry set his jaw. "I saw the two of you together last night. The way you talked to each other and worked together - "

"You were stoned."

"I was getting over it. You guys didn't just work together, back before the explosion. You were friends. Really good friends. Cisco, you don't lock a friend into a cell. You trust them."

"Just like you trusted Iris, right? And didn't shut her out?"

"That's not fair."

"Nope, she didn't think so either."

"I was - protecting her - "

"Yeah, you keep telling yourself that. Maybe someday you'll believe it instead of the truth, which was that you just wanted to keep turning up in a fucking awesome suit and see her look at you like you were some cool, amazing, mysterious superhero instead of the guy she'd been overlooking for the past fifteen years."

He stormed out of the cortex.

About a hundred yards down the corridor, his steam ran out, and he stopped. Pressed his fingers into his eyes. Whispered, "Fuck."

He turned around and went back. Barry was still sitting at the workstation, his face like a kicked puppy's.

"I'm sorry," Cisco said. "That was an asshat thing to say."

Barry nodded a little. "It's . . . okay. Maybe it's the truth."

"Yeah, it is, and you know it," Cisco said. "But I shouldn't've said it when we were fighting about something else. I'm sorry."

Barry closed his eyes. "I don't know what to do," he said. "So I just . . . keep shutting her out." He shook his head hard. "Maybe that's why I don't want to see you do it."

Cisco leaned against the workstation. "You wanna know the truth? You want to know what my gut tells me?"

"Yeah."

"It's telling me that is still Caitlin." He reached and picked up a wrench, just for something to hold. "She will still say stuff like, 'oh, good, you vomited' and actually mean it. She still really cares about her clothes and how she looks, not because she's crazy vain, just because it makes her feel like she's all put together and in control. I mean, that coat? She's probably holding a wake for it. She's still snarky and no nonsense and she - " Cisco looked down at his wrench, flipping it around in his hands. "She still yells at the people she cares about."

Barry gestured the schematics for the cell. "So . . . "

"So you know who else I trusted? Wells."

Barry's face fell. "C'mon . . . that . . . That's not the same . . ."

"I know, I know. He did that deliberately. He made sure he had me, and you, and he had a _plan_ , like the Cylons, only not so fucking lame." He shoved his hair behind his ears. "But for all I know, Killer Frost has a plan too. And yeah, my gut is telling me that Caitlin's still there underneath the scary-ass powers and the criminal record, but you know what?" He Tossed his wrench down. "I'm not listening to my gut anymore."

Barry put his head in his hands and muttered, "If I didn't already have so many reasons to hate him, I would after hearing you say something like that."

Just then, the perimeter alarm went off. Barry sat up. "Is that her?"

Cisco checked the monitor. "Yep." He turned on all the temperature sensors and watched the ones near the front door sag downwards.

"Won't you reconsider?" Barry said from behind him.

"She's not my friend," Cisco said again, and started out of the cortex. Barry whooshed past him, and Cisco sighed.

Dumbass wasn't wearing his suit.

* * *

Caitlin hesitated in front of the doors, wondering if there was a doorbell she could ring. Last time, the Flash had been with her.

The time before that, she'd had a keycard and had walked in, smiling as Ronnie and Cisco geeked out over what might happen when the particle accelerator turned on that night.

She breathed in and out a few times, and looked around for an intercom.

There was a rush of wind, and all of a sudden a tall, lanky man stood in front of her, in the suddenly open doors. In slacks and a sweater vest over a button-down shirt, he looked like a cross between a nerdy grad student and a twelve-year-old boy dressed up for synagogue. "Hey," he said. "Come in."

"Hi," she said. "Thank you. Flash?"

"Call me Barry," he said. "Barry Allen."

She arched a brow at him. "Cisco won't be happy that you gave away your secret identity. He was tripping all over himself not to say your name last night."

Barry shrugged as if to say, _My secret identity, my call._ "Can I take something for you?" He gestured at the two duffel bags, one over each shoulder.

"I'm fine." She stared straight ahead, willing herself not to look around for fear she'd see ghosts.

* * *

Cisco gave Barry a filthy look when he walked in with Caitlin. "You're a dumbass."

Barry said, "She's gonna be here awhile, it doesn't make sense to wear the suit all that time."

Caitlin ignored the byplay and hoisted one bag off her shoulder, then the other, setting them on a free table. She rolled her shoulders under the giant, pillowy parka she wore, and pushed the fuzzy hood back.

"What's in those?" Cisco asked, leaning forward to see the bags.

"You'll see." She stood fiddling with the zipper on one bag, as if debating whether to take something out.

Barry said, "So. What - ah. What are we helping you with, Caitlin?"

She looked over her shoulder as if she'd forgotten he was there. Then she left her bag and walked over to the workstation where Cisco sat. She put her hand in her coat and drew the heat gun out.

Cisco went rigid, and in an instant, Barry stood between them, his eyes narrowed.

But she gave them both a scornful look. "The safety's on."

She flipped it around in her hand, holding it by the barrel, and reached around Barry to set it down on the work station. "You built this," she said to Cisco.

Unable to help himself, he pulled it away from her. "Yes."

"I want you to build me another one."

"No," he said.

"Why not?"

"You said this favor wasn't for a weapon."

"It won't be."

"So . . . It'll be the non-lethal kind of gun that can melt granite. Okay. Gotcha."

"Not a gun," she said. "An implant. For me. My body can't create its own heat. Quite the opposite. I want you to build something that will supply the heat I need so my body doesn't leach it from other sources."

Like people.

His eyes fell to the gun. He picked it up and turned it over in his hands a few times.

She nodded to it. "I could just shoot myself with that periodically, but it would be very hard on my clothes."

He set it down again. "This - is a gun."

"Thank you for clearing that up."

"No, I'm saying, it's not particularly sophisticated. Point and shoot. You're talking about a medical device. Small enough to be implanted. Supplying heat at a constant rate. And the power source - !" He bit his lip, ideas already fizzing.

"I know that look," she said. "You're interested."

"Maybe I am - "

She snorted.

"But this is not gonna be something I throw together on a sleepy Wednesday afternoon, all right?"

"I did say I didn't know how long it would take. And by the way - " She pointed at herself. "Bioengineer. Did you honestly think I haven't given this some thought already? Worked out the theories? Mick shooting me last night just proved them."

"And that's another thing," he said. "Your heat sense went all wonky after he shot you. Don't lie, Caitlin, I know it did. And I'm guessing the rest of your powers did too. You got them back, but - "

"Isn't that a point in its favor? What good have my powers ever done for anybody?"

He thought of Justin, freezing to death in agony.

"If this goes wrong," he said, "it could go really wrong. Fatally wrong."

She went back to where she'd stacked her bags. She picked up the top one and brought it back. Undoing the zipper, she pulled out a pill bottle. Then another. And another.

They marched across Cisco's desk like a barricade. She set one last one down. "These are all the drugs I take on a daily basis."

Cisco felt his mouth fall open.

Barry leaned over, squinting at the bottles. Looking up, he asked, "What do they do?"

"They dampen my ability to draw in heat."

The words escaped Cisco's mouth. "Do they help keep you warm?"

Her eyes flicked toward him, then away. "No."

"Every day?" Barry asked.

"I am a walking rain stick," she said. "The point that they carry a host of nasty side effects. They're hell on my body. I'm building up a tolerance, so I have to continually increase my dosage. And I have to steal them. If there's another way to control this cold inside of me, I want to find it."

Cisco turned the gun over in his hands a few more times. Barry looked at his hands, then rearranged a couple of the pill bottles for no apparent reason.

"Okay," Cisco said at last.

"You'll do it?"

"Yeah."

She nodded. He couldn't read her eyes. "All right." She put her hand back in the bag and pulled out a stack of manila folders, slapping them down in front of Cisco. "These are my notes - " Slap. "My calculations." Slap. "My observations." Slap. "Now. Where am I staying?"

* * *

They both walked her through the corridors. Barry kept shooting Cisco looks behind her back that Cisco pretended not to see. It was fine, he argued with himself. The cell was designed to supply all the heat she needed. She was taking so many drugs.

Oh my god. So many. It wasn't so much a drug cocktail as a drug Tiki bar, complete with little paper umbrellas.

He stole a look. Did she _look_ sick? She was pale and thin and . . .

Hell, he didn't know.

When they turned the corner to the pipeline, she missed a step. "Here?" she asked, with a tremor in her voice.

He looked, and suddenly the memory slapped him upside the head - standing here, holding her hands in his as she clutched the walkie-talkie, screaming Ronnie's name -

Fuck. How had he forgotten? _Fuck._

Barry, who didn't even know the whole story, glared at him.

"It - it's where the cells are," Cisco said uncomfortably. "But - we can - "

"It's fine," she said.

"Are you - "

"It's. Fine."

He hit the button on the control panel and brought her cell forward. When it clanked into position and the doors opened, she stepped in, scanning the floor. Cisco had installed space heaters all along the base of three walls, safe behind grilles. He tapped a button on the panel and they glowed into life. She put her hands out toward them, turning in place.

"What do you have this set at?" she asked him, the way she used to ask him about any piece of data or mechanical setting.

"Eighty-five. Too hot?"

"Can you turn it up?"

He swiped to the thermostat and tapped the up arrow. "How's an even hundred?" The heaters glowed brighter.

Her eyes drifted closed. Her lips parted. "Nice. Very nice."

Cisco swallowed and felt sweat spring up at his hairline. Just because of the heat spilling out of the cell, he told himself. "There's a fire system," he found himself babbling. "Everything's fire-retardant, and the suppression system is foam based and it'll, um, it's very sensitive, so we're not going to burn you alive."

She smiled a little. "It won't be a problem. But points for being thorough. You usually are, though."

He didn't respond.

"Do you need anything?" Barry wanted to know.

She moved her hands over the blankets on the bed. "Do I have access to water in here?"

"In the bathroom." Barry showed her how to pull out the recessed toilet and sink, a design Cisco had lifted from _Firefly_.

"And something to boil it?"

"There's no plugs," Cisco told her.

"Cisco will figure something out," Barry said. "Battery-operated or something. For coffee?"

"Tea," she said.

She set her bags on the bed and sat down next to them, surveying the hundred or so square feet that belonged to her now.

"There's a video feed," Cisco said. "And an audio feed. And my phone is getting data right from the heating system, so - if anything goes wrong, you know, I'll hear about it."

She nodded.

"Okay," Cisco said. "Well. We'll let you get settled in . . . " He trailed off, backing away. Barry joined him, and they both hesitated, looking at the panel that would shut the cell and send it back to its spot on the pipeline.

She looked up. "Aren't you going to lock me in?"

Cisco swallowed, then tapped the panel. The doors shut and locked, and the cover irised shut.

* * *

When the cell had clanked to a stop, Caitlin let out her breath.

It was so _warm_ in here.

She peeled off her coat and folded it over the bag with her pills. She unzipped the other bag and pulled out the space blanket. She considered it, then left it folded up in its little package. It would actually work against her here.

There was a heavy flannel blanket on her bed. She ran her palm over it, then pulled it back and crawled under it, snuggling into the duck-down softness. The bed itself wasn't very comfortable, but she didn't really care that much.

She lay on her back, hands fisted on her stomach under the blanket.

It was very hard being back here. She'd thought the first time would be the worst, but of course not. The first time, she'd been in the cortex. Today, she'd moved through much of the rest of Star Labs, the place where she'd worked, seeing ghosts.

And then Cisco had put her in the pipeline.

Her fingernails dug into her stomach. The cold stabbed up and down her spine.

No matter where she was in Star Labs, the pipeline would still be there. And unless they'd done quite a bit of reconstruction, there weren't a lot of other places to put her. Not with her needs. Not securely.

Tomorrow would be worse, she reminded herself. Tomorrow, she would actually be working again. Would she ever get desensitized to it? Or would she just go quietly crazy, and encase herself in a prison of ice?

Well, she might go crazy, but she'd never manage to ice herself over. Not in this cell.

Maybe not.

She rolled her head on the pillow and stared out into the greyness of the pipeline.

She'd known it would be difficult. But she was inside Star Labs. It was what she'd wanted.

After a moment, she rolled to her side, putting her back to it and her face to the wall. Pulling her legs up, tucking her chin in, she pulled the soft blanket over her shoulders and closed her eyes.


	9. Chapter 9

Cisco spent the next couple of hours shoulders-deep in Caitlin's folders. Eventually, Barry talked him into going home, but he took the folders with him. He spread them out on the living room floor, his phone next to him, and kept reading.

Sometime later, he woke up with his face mashed into the carpet and his contacts like pebbles in his eyes.

He flailed around for his phone and checked the sensors on Caitlin's cell. Everything was holding steady, and had been since he'd left Star Labs. It was dark out, and he'd come home in the middle of the afternoon. He checked the time and found that he'd slept on the floor for something like ten hours.

Okay, so maybe there had been something to that whole well-rested thing, he thought, rolling his shoulder and wincing. He debated, then pulled everything together and tried to get another couple of hours of sleep in his own bed. But dreams intruded, dreams of fire and ice that left him rolling, gasping, cowering among his blankets and pillows.

Fucking dreams.

He turned on the light, found his glasses, and tackled Caitlin's notes again.

She still had terrible handwriting, and a sense of organization that would have made the Library of Congress proud. He set the first folder down and went to get his tablet. As he read, he dictated notes into the speech-to-text app. Occasionally, he grabbed a stylus, swiped over to his drawing program, and scribbled a quick sketch. He thought about doodling the sketches right in her notes, but rejected that right away.

When he'd read through all of them, he checked the time again and decided it wasn't too ridiculously early to go in.

He kept glancing over at the folders on his passenger seat as he drove, and at one particularly long stoplight, he picked one up and started flipping through it again. The blare of horns made him hit the gas, answering the waved middle fingers with one of his own.

When he walked into Star Labs, the first thing he did was check Caitlin's cell again, with the video feed this time. She was still asleep, curled up in a knot with the blanket pulled all the way up over her head. All that showed of her were a few locks of hair trailing over her pillow and the fingertips of one hand, curled around the hem of the blanket.

He briefly debated waking her up, but it didn't seem likely that becoming a metahuman had made her any more of a morning person. He turned off the video feed. He needed the monitor for other things.

Besides, watching her sleep? That was some sparkly-vampire level of perv, right there.

He started uploading his notes to the Star Labs server, then scanning in hers, reading them again as he did so. He paused to scrawl a few more thoughts on the pad of graph paper by his computer.

Some hours later, a blip in his sensors made him turn on the audio feed again. Soft rustles told him she was stirring, at least. He switched the audio feed to two-way. "Caitlin?"

A pause. "Yes."

"You awake?"

"Obviously."

Yep. Definitely still not a morning person. "Okay," he said. "I read through your notes and I've got about fifty million tests I wanna perform, so . . . If you're ready, I'll come let you out and we can get started."

"Give me ten minutes."

* * *

They fell into a routine - Cisco arriving in the morning, working on his own until Caitlin let him know she was awake. They would work for most of the day, and before Cisco went home at night, he would take her back to her cell and lock her in again.

Central City was very quiet at the moment, without the Rogues or Killer Frost on the loose. Cisco monitored the feeds, and sent Barry off to perform his Flashy miracles, but they'd been doing that so long that it hardly blipped his days. When Barry stopped in, it was most often to say hi or bring a meal in a plastic bag.

The perimeter alarm went off, and Cisco absently slapped a hand over his notes until the wind died down and Barry sprawled in the next chair over.

"Hey," Cisco said, combing his hair off his face. "What are you doing here so late?"

"That's my question for you," Barry said. "You said you were going home just as soon as you locked up."

"Yeah, well, I wanted to finish something real quick."

"That was three hours ago."

"Taking longer than I thought."

"What is it?"

"Mmm, it's printing up right now." He waved at the 3-D printer that was his pride and joy. "Meantime, I'm just looking at these graphs. See that one? That's from a sensor she's wearing in her armpit to keep track of her core temperature."

Barry held up a hand. "Armpit? Really?"

"It won't stay put under her tongue and let's just say the other option is not an option."

"What's the other - ?" His friend turned as red as his suit when he remembered about rectal thermometers. "Armpit! Right! Gotcha. Go ahead."

On the screen, a blue line squiggled up and down. Cisco ran his finger along it. "That's her core temperature."

Barry squinted at the numbers. "Okay, what scale is that on? Because those numbers don't look right for Fahrenheit or Kelvin."

"We compromised. It's Celsius." Cisco made a face. He'd argued hard for Kelvin, all nice without negative numbers. "Humans have a body temperature around thirty-seven degrees. Hypothermia sets in around thirty-five."

Barry leaned forward. "That's way below thirty-five."

"After a night in her cell, she can sometimes get up to thirty. During the day, it goes down through the twenties and the teens, with dives as low as five."

"What would happen if it got to zero, d'you think?"

Cisco grimaced. "No idea."

"But that'll improve once she's off the meds, right? They inhibited her heat-sucking abilities. They were keeping her cold."

"And keeping other people safe," Cisco said. "But you're right that her heat-sucking is going to rev up. So I slapped this together." He unfolded a thin white tank top, with wires running through it. "It's a thermal shirt. That box and belt? Battery pack."

Barry's brows shot up. "You just - slapped that together."

Actually, no. He'd had the design for seven months, hidden away in a file.

Cisco shrugged. "It's a stopgap. It'll never keep up with her, not really. But it'll supply some, maybe enough that she can be around us without having to take the meds. And as for that - well, that's what I wanted to finish up. Something to keep an eye on that. Check this. I filmed it earlier." He cued up a video.

Caitlin stood in the locked lab, her eyes glittering blue as mist swirled around her hand, coalescing into a deadly ice dagger with a razor edge. She'd been pretty annoyed at him. He'd double-checked the insulation and the locks, and he'd still gotten a chill up his spine.

(Although. Damn. _Ice dagger_.)

He ran it again in thermal vision. "You see that? You see?"

Barry squinted. "Are her hands actually colder than the rest of her when she makes that dagger?"

"She's focusing the heat drain through her hands. So - " He cued up his tablet, showing Barry the design on it. "Voila. These cuffs will tell us how hard she's pulling heat, involuntarily or on purpose. See those lights?"

"Do we want more or fewer lights?"

"Fewer." He tugged at his lip. "I figure five to eight will be okay to be in the room with her. Under five, you can get within a few feet."

"How high does it go?"

"Ten. Which, unless there's an equal and opposite heat source, is meat locker time."

Barry sighed. "I can't imagine living like that."

Cisco got up and went to the 3-D printer. The cuff casings had finished. He set them on his worktable and thought briefly about putting the innards together, but it would take at least an hour and Barry would get all mother henny and he just didn't feel like putting up with that right now. He'd get here early in the morning and assemble them before Caitlin woke up. "If we get this implant right, she won't have to anymore."

* * *

Caitlin sat cross-legged on her bed, reading through Cisco's thoughts on the testing, chewing on her lip. Someone knocked, hard, on the glass, and she jumped. The tablet almost slid off her lap, and she lunged for it. Star Labs certainly had more, all company property left over from when it had been a buzzing hive of research and development. But she had notes on there that she hadn't uploaded to the servers yet.

Tablet safe, she looked up.

Iris stood outside the door, looking furious. "Are you _locked in there_?" she demanded. "Just - _incarcerated_ all day?"

Caitlin set the tablet aside and got up. "It's fine, Iris," she called through the glass, regretting her decision not to move the cell back into the pipeline. But she hadn't known how long the cold flare would last, so she'd told Cisco to leave it where it was at the mouth.

"No, it's not fine, what crime have you committed?"

"Would you like an alphabetical list?"

"Was there a _trial_?" Iris looked ready to storm the Bastille all on her own.

Caitlin crossed her arms. "Iris, this is for safety's sake. I'm weaning myself off some of the drugs I've been taking, and I'm having a cold flare. Trust me, everyone's better off if I'm in here for awhile."

"But you can get out if you want, right?"

"It's better if I can't."

Iris looked livid.

"Iris. This is _fine_. It's my choice."

"That doesn't make it right."

"I don't much care about right anymore." Caitlin turned her back and returned to her bed. Cisco had sent her a message, something about the power source, and she read it, tapping her fingers on her leg. Little flares of mist trailed from her fingernails. She didn't need to check her new sensor cuffs to know that there were eight lights burning, with a ninth blinking. She did, anyway. It was nice to have something concrete to look at, a data point to quantify.

Her stomach churned - one of the other side effects of the weaning was nausea - and she got up to make some tea that would calm it. Cisco had come through with a battery-operated kettle and about two or three beat up mugs from the cabinets. She chose the one that had belonged to the HR director and rooted through her duffle for the box of ginger tea that settled her stomach.

She became aware that Iris was still outside the cell, sitting on the little platform, looking at her hands. She went back to the glass. "Honestly, Iris, it's okay," she said. "You don't have to sit with me."

Iris looked up, blinking, shaking her head as if she'd been a million miles away. "I'm not."

"Why did you come down here? Just to get up in arms? Are you going to put this on your blog?"

"No." Iris's voice trembled. "I just wanted to - to sit here for a little bit."

Caitlin stared at her. The kettle clicked.

"Why?" Caitlin said quietly.

"My. My boyfriend died. In there."

Not in the cell. Probably. There was no way Iris would still be working with the Flash and Cisco if her boyfriend had been an imprisoned metahuman. So . . . the pipeline, she meant.

"When?"

"Three months ago."

"What happened?"

"I don't want to talk about it."

"Okay."

"I'm sorry. That was - "

"You don't have to talk about it," Caitlin said.

They were quiet.

"Cisco said - that your fiance died. The night of the particle accelerator explosion."

"Yes."

"You don't want to talk about it?"

Caitlin poured boiling water over her teabag and added honey. "Honestly, it feels like something that happened to somebody else."

"Lucky," Iris whispered.

Caitlin stared into her tea. _You think so?_

* * *

By the day after Iris had visited her, the worst of that particular withdrawal was over. The cold in her stomach was as sharp as a broken tooth, but manageable.

When she asked, Cisco let her out, not without some reservations. "You're sure? You're sure the flare is done?"

She waved her wrists at him. "You've got these to tell you when I'm suddenly going to transform into a heat vampire."

His gaze lingered on them for a second, then flicked away. "I'm getting a lot of good data off them." They were wifi-linked to both their tablets.

"I know. I've been analyzing it." And it had been unexpectedly useful. She set the tablet down next to the work station. "Can you upload my notes to the server?"

"Sure." He plugged the tablet in, then shifted his body in between her and the keyboard. She rolled her eyes and looked away as he typed in the password to allow the tablet to link up. He'd locked it down, even when there was a cable connection.

"Hmmm," he said, studying her thoughts. "Well. That's a test we'll want to run today."

"Set it up, then," she said in a bored voice.

When he turned away, she skimmed her hand over the keyboard. The faintest flickers of heat told her the password.

"Caitlin?"

She jumped. "Yes?"

"Did you just suck in some heat? One of your sensors jumped."

She curled her hand into a fist and pushed it into her pocket. "I don't know. I might have flared. Set up the test already, Cisco."

* * *

For some reason, Iris kept coming back. She would drop in regularly, sometimes with an excuse like a new box of tea or bringing them lunch, sometimes not. She would say hi to Cisco, make impressed noises about whatever they were working or interested faces at whatever test they were performing, but her real purpose there seemed to be Caitlin.

She always, always talked at Caitlin until Caitlin broke down and started talking back to her.

They talked a little more about her dead boyfriend, but not very much. Caitlin gleaned that his name had been Eddie, he'd been a cop and Iris's father's partner, and he'd died saving everybody, in some vague, unspecified way. Iris started sobbing at that point and Caitlin didn't push for further details.

Sometimes they talked about Iris's job, or Caitlin's abilities - "off the record," Iris said - or whatever story Iris was working on for CCPN.

Caitlin couldn't remember the last female friend she'd had, even before her life iced over. As a woman in the sciences, she'd never had very much of a selection at work, and she'd had a hard time doing things for the express purpose of "meeting people." And when she did, she wasn't very good at it. She'd certainly never encountered anyone who was as willing to put quite so much energy into pursuing her friendship as Iris West was.

But. Well.

She liked it.

And she felt as if Iris needed it, too. The other woman could spend hours in the cortex, absently working on a story or surfing the internet. Caitlin got the feeling she just didn't want to go home to an empty apartment, echoing with Eddie's absence.

"You should check this out, Caitlin," she said one day, tilting the monitor towards her. "This is a very good sale. Cisco, do you mind? You're not setting up any new tests, are you?"

"Oh, no, nothing much. Shopping is way more important than science."

Without thinking, Caitlin rolled her eyes at him. "Like you don't check TeeFury every single day."

He pointed a tiny screwdriver at her. "Okay, that's different. Their designs change."

"So very true," Caitlin said, "and ModCloth _never_ puts up new styles."

Iris laughed. "Ooo, look at this one!"

Because Caitlin was turned away, she didn't see Iris reach out to touch her shoulder, but she felt it, right through her sweater and the thermal shirt. The cold woke with a roar, sending claws through her veins, snatching at the delicious warmth - and for a moment, Caitlin let it.

Then a set of alarms shrieked, Iris gasped, and Caitlin jolted back, her wheeled chair rolling a few feet with the force of her recoil.

"Sorry," Iris said. She was holding her hand, pressing it to her chest, her eyes wide.

"Are you okay?" Caitlin demanded. "Show me your hand."

It was fine. A little reddened, but no black or white patches of frostbite. "I'm fine." But Iris's voice shook. "I just wanted you to see this dress. I think you'd look really cute in it."

Caitlin didn't look at the screen. "I can't wear dresses anymore. Too much exposed skin." She got to her feet. "Cisco, I'd like to go back to my cell."

"Yeah," Cisco said, putting down the heat gun. "That - we can do that."

* * *

Cisco stuck his hands in his pockets so she wouldn't see them trembling. The near-miss with Iris had shaken him, and he hated that he'd grabbed for the heat gun without so much as thinking about it. He hated, too, that it was about the smartest thing he could have done.

When he opened up her cell, letting the sauna warmth of it roll out around them, she walked straight in and grabbed a blanket from her bed, wrapping it around herself.

"You okay?" he asked her.

She sat down on her bed and stared at the wall. "I think I'm getting too comfortable."

He put his hand on the glass, wishing it was her shoulder, knowing he couldn't.

She said, "How far would you say we are from a workable prototype?"

"A couple of days."

"Can it be faster?"

"Yes," he promised.

She nodded and pulled the blanket tight around herself.

When he went back up to the cortex, Iris was still there, studying the mess on his worktable. He said, "How's your hand?"

She flexed her fingers. "Kinda feels like I was sifting around the ice bucket too long."

He dug into a box under his worktable. "Here." He handed her a reusable hot pack and a towel to wrap around it. He'd bought several when Caitlin had arrived.

"Thanks. Is she okay?"

"Shaken up. Iris, you can't - "

"I know, I forgot."

He toyed with his screwdriver, hating what he was about to say. "Maybe it's not such a good idea, you coming around."

Iris glared. "You're as bad as Barry. Trying to wrap me up in cotton balls for my own good."

"Or maybe it's for Caitlin's good," he fired back. "Iris, you write about metahumans using their powers in big flashy ways, no pun intended. You have no idea what it's like living with them on a daily basis."

"Then maybe it's time I learned."

Cisco's eyes narrowed. "Is that why you come see her? Are you just trying to punch up your blog?"

"No!"

"Then why?"

She fiddled with the hot pack. "Do you know what skin hunger is?"

"Sounds like a horrifying meta power."

"Nothing metahuman about it. Just human. I did a paper on it for a psych class. There are studies that showed that being held and cuddled stimulate chemicals in a baby's brain that help their development. Not only emotional development - overall, body and brain. And babies who didn't get that, or didn't get enough, suffered from this thing called 'failure to thrive.' If it was bad enough, they might die."

"For real?"

"Yeah. We never lose that," Iris said. "Human beings need to be touched. And not like sex, necessarily. Just - touched. A hug, or taking their hand, or - anything really." She looked back at Cisco. "She hasn't been touched in a year and half, Cisco."

"She can't," Cisco said. "Her powers - She could kill you."

"I know," Iris said quietly. "Isn't that just about the saddest thing you've ever heard?"

"Don't feel sorry for her."

"I know you hate her for some reason - "

"I don't hate her. I just - I know her. She'd be furious if she thought you felt sorry for her."

Cisco buried his head in the design, feeling Iris's eyes bore into the side of his head.


	10. Chapter 10

The next day, Iris came by with Big Belly Burger for their dinner. Caitlin surprised herself by eating all her french fries and rooting around the bag for more. Iris was beaming at Caitlin like her bubbe beaming at a cleaned plate when Barry whooshed in.

"Iris," he said.

"Barry," she said.

Caitlin almost checked her sensors, the temperature dropped that fast.

"What are you doing here?"

"Seeing my friends."

"Iris, I told you, I don't want - "

"Yes, I'm in so much danger," she said sarcastically. "This French fry here, it's going to develop metahuman abilities and jump up and attack me." She waved the fry at him. It broke in the middle and drooped sadly in her grip. "Would you just retire that sad old argument, Barry?"

He scowled. "You don't have any powers that'll protect you."

"Neither does Cisco!"

Out of the corner of her eye, Caitlin saw Cisco look down at his tablet.

"Cisco's been here since the beginning. You haven't."

"That's not my fault, now is it?"

Barry made an inarticulate noise of frustration and whooshed out again. Cisco tipped up his tablet. "He's running laps around the city," he reported to Iris.

"Maybe he should run out to sea and soak his head for awhile," Iris growled.

"I would think," Caitlin said, pouring herself coffee from the giant pot that was always going in a corner of the lab now, "that you'd be a little nicer to your meal ticket. How many bylines did you get out of him?"

Iris's eyes narrowed. Caitlin let her mouth curl up at the corners.

Iris let out a snort of breath and sat back. "Okay. You've already figured it out anyway."

"The outlines," Caitlin said. "A sketch. How long have you known each other?"

"Twenty years, give or take." Iris fiddled with the wrapper from her burger.

"So, long before the explosion."

"Long, long before." Iris looked up. "We were friends when we were kids. Then, when we were eleven, his mom died and his dad went to prison for it."

"He didn't do it," Cisco said quickly. "Barry's dad. He's innocent."

"Who did?"

Iris and Cisco carefully didn't look at each other. Caitlin added that to her rapidly growing list of the secrets of Star Labs. Something about Barry's mother's murder - something they weren't going to let Killer Frost in on.

"They thought they had the killer, so they never bothered looking further."

That didn't sound like the Barry Allen Caitlin was getting to know, but she didn't pursue it. "So - ?"

"Anyway, when that happened, he had nobody, so my dad took him in. We grew up together."

Caitlin nodded, turning over the passive aggressive jabs and mysterious comments she'd heard. "He didn't tell you," she said. "When the explosion turned him into the Flash."

"He was in a coma for nine months. Nine months! And one day, he just woke up and picked his life back up like nothing had happened. But it did. He had these powers. And everyone knew. My dad, my boyfriend, Cisco - it was just me. He just kept me out of the loop."

"To keep you safe," Caitlin said. "Or so he thinks."

"Got it."

Caitlin hummed and swirled her coffee. She hadn't gotten to the pot in time and Cisco had made it. He still made terrible coffee - like scorched tar water. She went into the medical lab and dumped it down the sink, then dug out her hot-water kettle. Bringing it back in, she said, "Well, you're certainly making him suffer."

Cisco put in, "Iris, you forgave me a long time ago. Isn't it about time to let up on Barry?"

"I forgave you because he made you part of his lie. It wasn't your choice."

"And," Caitlin said, "because it's much easier to forgive somebody you don't have any history with."

Cisco, reaching across his worktable for a tool, went still and looked up at her. She looked back steadily. He broke the staring match first.

Iris seemed not to have noticed. "I think that's it," she was saying. "It's strange, you know? Someone that you've been that close to, for that long, and then you find out they have this whole other life that you didn't know about. I mean, I'm angry. I really am. Don't get me wrong. But - " She flailed a hand. "- he's my - he's Barry. Cutting him out of my life would be like cutting off my arm."

The kettle clicked, and Caitlin rooted around in the desk until she found a teabag. "Did you two ever - ?"

"No!" Iris yelped. "No. No. We never. I - He's like my brother."

Caitlin paused, halfway through doctoring her tea with copious amounts of sugar, and slid her eyes sideways at Iris. Then she gave Cisco a _is-she-serious-right-now?!_ look.

He rolled his eyes to the ceiling and gave her a little nod. _Yep. That's what she thinks._

She snorted soundlessly and stirred her tea. "Is he still charging around the city?" she asked Cisco.

"Yep."

"Call him back," Caitlin said. "He wanted to be here for the first test, and I don't feel like waiting out his temper tantrum."

* * *

Barry came back in about ten minutes, carefully avoiding looking at Iris, who avoided looking at him, so really they were equal. He asked what he could do to help set up, and Cisco sent him out for a couple of last-minute things that they needed. Iris just kept out of the way, tucked into a corner, smiling encouragingly at Caitlin every time she caught the other woman's eye.

Iris was excited for Caitlin, even though she barely knew the other woman. She liked her, though, liked her razor sharp intelligence, her prickliness and her scowl and the way she'd said, _You don't have to talk about it._

Everybody always wanted to _talk_ about Eddie, even when Iris didn't.

And when Iris did want to talk about Eddie, Caitlin listened, without mouthing platitudes. Which really had saved Iris's sanity over the past week or so.

Barry was back in a couple of seconds with the last few things, and they could get started. For testing purposes, Cisco had mocked up something that looked like a nicotine patch, with a fat lump of electronics and a tiny needle in the center. It wasn't what she would wear in the end - and they were still fighting off and on about the final design, Caitlin stubborn about wanting a subdermal implant and Cisco trying to convince her to have a transdermal one. Iris wasn't sure what the difference was and anytime she asked they started bickering again.

Caitlin made Cisco wear heavy rubber insulated gloves to apply it. They looked like something reserved for Arctic researchers, and Iris had no idea how Cisco's manual dexterity suffered. From the face he made as he tugged them on, he wasn't a fan either.

Caitlin hopped up to sit on the same hospital bed that Barry had spent so many months in. Iris pulled up a chair at the foot, wishing she could hold the other woman's hand for moral support. She wasn't sure that Caitlin would accept it even if she couldn't flash-freeze Iris like a side of beef.

Cisco marked the spot with a surgical marker. "There?"

"Yes."

"Okay," he said and switched on the mike. He narrated the time and date, and then said, "Tester One. Core temperature is twenty-two point five degrees."

Iris did the math in her head and shivered. There were corpses warmer than Caitlin Snow.

Cisco used a set of tweezers to pick up the tester and position it between her shoulder blades. With the tip of one rubber-gloved finger, he pressed it against her skin until she jumped. Mist roiled out from her skin, and he stepped back fast. For a moment, it hung in the air, and dissipated.

"Needle's in," she reported.

"How is it?" he asked.

"Give me the tape."

He shoved the surgical tape in her direction, and she taped the tester down with a neat X. She pressed on it a few times, as if testing how it sat.

"Bare, how's the link?" Cisco asked over his shoulder.

Barry checked Cisco's tablet. "Data's coming through."

"Your core just went up to twenty-three. How does it feel?"

She breathed in and out. "Like - like somebody pouring warm wax down my spine."

"Okay, in a good way?"

"It's warm, Cisco. That means good." She turned her hands palm-up on her knees and stared at the sensors, watching the lights. Iris leaned over to see. As they watched, one of the lights blinked out.

Barry checked the data again and frowned. "Man, some of your gauges are going red, here." He turned the tablet so Cisco could see.

Cisco leaned over to take it. "Going full blast. Maybe I should - "

There was a pop, and a splash of sparks, and Caitlin shrieked. In a split second, Iris found herself across the room, under the workstation on the ground, Barry crouching over her. She panted a little, then shoved at his arms. He sat back and let her crawl out.

"What happened?" he asked Cisco, who was peering at the blackened, smoking tangle of wires and warped plastic stuck to Caitlin's back.

"At a guess? It couldn't keep up. Wow," he whispered.

"My shirt," Caitlin said sharply. The whole back of her shirt was burned away in a line down her spine, and she grabbed it as it started to slide forward off her arms.

Iris started to grab her coat, but Cisco was closer. He snatched the hoodie hanging off his chair and put it over Caitlin's shoulders.

"Thanks," she muttered. She reached back and peeled the blackened, smoking remains of the first tester off her back. She studied it, then dropped it on the workstation. "So - it worked. For how long?"

He checked his tablet. "Forty-three seconds." He stripped the heavy gloves off and tossed them aside, then pulled the tray towards him and swung his magnifier around to peer at the burn pattern. "Forty-three seconds of data is not shabby."

"Send me the anatomical data. I'll add my impressions." She zipped up the hoodie.

"You're taking this awfully well," Iris said.

"It's science, Iris, not magic," Caitlin said. Then, to Cisco and Barry, "If that's going to be a common reaction, I'll want some hospital gowns. I don't have so many shirts that I can sacrifice one every time we do a new test."

A few minutes later, Caitlin excused herself to make some tea. Iris went after her.

The Star Labs break room was down the hall, a spare room with a disreputable couch, a battered chair, and a TV with video games and DVDs stacked on top. There was also a kitchen area, with a fridge, a sink, and some cabinets.

Caitlin was curled in a ball on the floor in the corner formed by the counter and the wall. Her knees were pulled up to her chest, her forehead pressed into her knees, her arms wrapped around her shins. Mist spilled off her skin, swirling in the air. It was weirdly beautiful.

Iris took a step into the room, her hand outstretched.

A hand closed around her elbow. When she looked back, Cisco shook his head at her. "Don't," he said.

"But - "

"I know, but don't," he said. He pushed past her and walked into the room himself, stopping a few feet away from Caitlin and squatting so they were at the same level. "Hey," he said quietly.

She lifted her head.

"This was just the first test," he told her. "Next time, we'll fail better."

She looked at him a moment, her face set and white. She didn't _look_ as if she'd been crying, Iris thought.

She got to her feet, tall and cold. "I'm going back to my cell," she told him.

Still squatting on the floor, he tipped his head back to look up at her. "Okay."

"I need to change."

"Okay," he said again.

She walked past him, past Iris, past Barry who stood in the hallway, and down the curving corridor toward the pipeline.

Iris shivered as a bitter wind followed her.


	11. Chapter 11

(A/N) Some of Cisco's dreams are taken from the show, some from my own fic, and some from other Killervibe fic out there. Thanks to Jaegermighty for letting me use snippets from her stories Some Sad Things That I Know About You and Bisect, and journalistiriswest (Tumblr) / RaiLockhart(AO3) for letting me use a bit from the drabble that became No Man's Land. All of these stories can be found on AO3.

* * *

The testers worked their way up from forty-three seconds to a minute to ten minutes, to half an hour. It wasn't an even progression. Sometimes Cisco's tweak made everything slide backwards. None of them made it beyond forty-five minutes before failing in some way or another.

They didn't always explode. Sometimes they fizzled out with a sad sound like a leaking balloon. Sometimes they refused to work at all. Caitlin's notion of the hospital gowns proved sound, and they went through several of them even though she always undid the ties.

The day they tested three models in a row and almost set the cortex on fire, Barry called a halt. "You should go home for the day," he told Cisco.

"It's only four o'clock," Cisco said, turning on a fan. The flames had barely had a chance to get started before Caitlin had swiped her hand over them and sucked them to nothingness, but they'd still smoked, and the air stank of melted plastic and burnt wool.

"In the morning or the afternoon?"

When Cisco paused, Barry pointed at the sunlight pouring in through the skylights. "That's not supposed to be a trick question! You're working flat out on this, both of you, and you need to take a break."

"Fine. I'll go get some dinner or - "

"Nope. You need to go home. You need to shower, you need to sleep, and you need to eat real food, not things mostly made up of grease, sugar, or caffeine."

"Don't be harshing on my main food groups, man." Cisco picked up the paper cup sitting by his computer and sucked the straw. It made a hollow whistling sound. Every drop of liquid in it had been drained long before.

"And Caitlin, you need to do the same. I mean," Barry paused, feeling awkward. "N-not that - "

"Yes, I understood what you meant." Caitlin reached out and picked up the green hoodie, shrugging into it. Barry had noticed that it always seemed to be around now, especially on testing days. It also seemed to have become Caitlin's sole property, even though the cuffs were all stretched out from the way Cisco used to shove them up his arms, and the edges of the pockets were ratty and worn. "And I agree."

"You're on his side now?" Cisco asked her, half joking, half not.

"I'm on my side," she said. "You do whatever you want, Cisco. I couldn't care less. But I'm going back to my cell." She turned on her heel and strode out of the cortex.

Cisco scrubbed his hands over his face. "I'm outnumbered."

He looked exhausted. It was so easy to miss that kind of thing on Cisco's face, which was always moving, always alight with concentration or laughter or his rapid-fire banter. But now, with all of those things wiped away, Barry could see the shadows under his eyes, the lines around his mouth, and the shadows on his jaw and upper lip that meant he'd shaved many, many hours before.

"Fine, okay, I'll go home." Like a lot of people who loved taking care of other people, Cisco got twitchy and grumpy when somebody did it to him.

Barry said, "I'll take you."

Cisco flinched. He got speedsick whenever Barry had to whoosh him places. It had been relegated to strictly an emergency option.

"In your car," Barry said, exasperated. "Where are your keys?"

It was a mark of how tired Cisco was that he just handed them over, without giving Barry one ounce of shit about how his license had expired and it had been a year and a half since he drove anything. While Barry drove, he dozed in the passenger seat, head bouncing slightly against the window.

At a light, he jolted awake with a gasp.

"You okay?" Barry asked him.

"Yeah, just - yeah." He shifted, straightening up. "Hey, we gotta stop for food or something. If your whole mother hen thing is going to be satisfied."

"No grease, sugar, or - "

"I know, I heard you the first time, I just don't have anything in my fridge."

"I'll drop you home and see what Joe's got for leftovers."

Cisco lit up briefly. "Awesome, I haven't had Joe leftovers in, like, forever."

Barry left him at his apartment and parked his car in what he hoped was the correct space, because according to Cisco his neighbors were total jackasses about it if you stole their spot, even by accident. Then he zipped back to Joe's, rooted around in the refrigerator, and zipped back.

Cisco was sitting on his couch, studying a set of graphs on his tablet.

"Cisco," Barry said heavily, feeling like a high school teacher who'd caught a kid reading a comic book in his chemistry text.

"Dude! I just sat down, you know that!"

"So you're just going to get up, and you're just going to eat this delicious - " Barry checked the tupperware. "Chicken and noodle thing, and then you're just gonna shower and go to bed."

Cisco made a face. "Fine, Dad."

Barry went to put the chicken and noodle thing in the microwave, only then seeing the note that said, "For my lunch, Barry, DON'T TOUCH" in Joe's blocky handwriting. He sighed. Oh well. Joe was at least used to Barry eating everything in the refrigerator. Maybe he'd try cooking something tonight to make up for it. Joe had taught him to cook so he was pretty all right at it. Like, he hadn't poisoned anybody yet.

Five minutes on the reheat cycle and a good stir later, Cisco was plowing through the chicken and noodle thing, drinking a big glass of water - " _Not soda_ ," Barry had said sternly - and Barry was wandering around, drinking his own glass of water and looking around the kitchen. It looked sad and a little unkempt, like nobody had been using it. Actually, the whole apartment looked that way. A peek into the fridge had revealed absolutely nothing that wouldn't give someone food poisoning, there was a layer of dust thick enough for Barry to write his name on the TV stand, and when he picked up the video-game controller next to the TV, it left a pattern of dust-free circles on the laminate.

"Cisco," he said over his shoulder. "You have been coming back here, right?"

Cisco shrugged, his mouth full.

"I mean, to sleep, at least."

Cisco swallowed. "I haven't been sleeping so well lately," he admitted. "So - I figure if I'm going to not sleep, I might as well not sleep at the lab where I can get some work done."

Barry swallowed too. "It's not - it's not those dreams again, is it? I mean, of Thawne - you know. Because he's gone, Cisco. He's not coming back."

"Tell that to my subconscious," Cisco said, but he shook his head. "I promise, I'm not dreaming about Thawne. I mean, not much. It's just insomnia. Thinking about the implant. It's a puzzle. You know I like puzzles."

Barry had the feeling he shouldn't accept that explanation, but he was also pretty sure Cisco had closed the subject.

Cisco finished the food, scraping the last bits of sauce out of the bottom, and Barry took the tupperware back. "I'll take this back to Joe's and wash it. You hit the showers."

"You mean you're not going to give me a bath?" Cisco blinked. "That came out dirty, sorry."

Barry shook his head. "I'll see you tomorrow, okay? Try and sleep."

He was halfway to Joe's when he thought of something, turned around, and went back to Cisco's apartment for the tablet. Trust Cisco to wait until he was gone to "just do a couple of things" and next thing you knew it was three in the morning and he hadn't slept. Again.

He dropped by Star Labs and left it at Cisco's workstation. About to leave, he paused, turning on the audio feed to the pipeline cell. "Hey, uh, Caitlin? How are you doing?"

"I was sleeping," she growled.

"Right," he said, and left her to it.

Back at Joe's, he did his best to replicate the chicken and noodle thing. Cooking wasn't something you could do at Flash speeds, he'd discovered. Or at least, not all of it.

The front door opened. "Hey, Dad!"

He froze, wondering if maybe he should whoosh away, but there was the saucepan of water heating for the noodles, and the chicken he was defrosting and -

"Oh," said Iris. "Barry."

"Hey," he said, trying not to overanalyze the two words. Was that, "Oh, Barry!" or " _Oh._ Barry" or "Oh, _Barry_ ," or -

She took a step or two into the kitchen, her hands behind her back. Her eyes swept over the counter, then lifted to meet his. "So," she said, a shade too brightly and casually. "Dinner?"

"Um, some of it. I sort of stole Joe's lunch for tomorrow and I'm trying to make more."

"Was it at least worth the crime?"

"I don't know, but Cisco seemed to like it." He felt his shoulders relax. He and Iris hadn't talked like this in months. Not since she'd stormed into Star Labs, confronted him about his mountain of lies, and stormed out again.

She fiddled with her necklace. "How's the implant going?"

He rooted around the pantry for a can of mushroom soup, which was the base for like seventy-five percent of Joe's noodle things so it was a safe bet. "Mmm. Not great. I made them pack it in for today."

"Good," Iris said. "Caitlin's really struggling with how long it's taking."

"How can you tell?"

"How can you not?"

His phone buzzed.

 _Screw u, Allen!_

 **U wouldn't know I'd taken it if u hadn't looked**

 _I was hurt Gina witch Star Trek_

 **?**

 **Autocorrect?**

 _NETFLIX JERK_

Barry snickered a little. He'd never known it was possible to whine over text. **2 bad, watch it on ur giant TV**

He turned his phone off, figuring he'd done everything he could short of force-feeding Cisco sleeping pills. Maybe some comfort TV would knock him out. "So," he said to Iris. "You, um, you wanna stay for dinner?"

* * *

 _"Gaaahah, no!" Cisco tossed the controller aside and let his head drop back against her leg._

 _"Lost again?" Caitlin asked from above him. She'd claimed the comfy cushion, and sat with one leg tucked up under her and the other thrown over his shoulder - a position their friends proclaimed 'disgustingly adorable.'_

 _"No, I beat the whole game. That's what the scream of rage was about."_

 _She snorted and shifted, making the short skirt of her sundress edge up her thigh a little more. Her knee brushed against his hair._

 _He rolled his eyes up toward her. "How's your book?"_

 _"Very interesting."_

 _"Really," he drawled, cupping his hand around her smooth calf._

 _"Don't you have a level to beat or something?"_

 _"Gotta give my thumbs a break." He ran his hand down to her foot, cupping the heel for a moment. Her toes wiggled._

 _"Don't try to distract me," she said sternly. "This is a library book. The loan expires tomorrow."_

 _"What, me?" He turned his head and kissed the silky skin on the inside of her knee. "How could I possibly - " Another kiss, higher up. "Distract you - " Kiss, on the softness of her inner thigh. "From such - " Kiss. "An interesting - "_

 _She leaned over his head and slapped her e-reader down on the coffee table next to the box of the game. Still leaning over, she caught his chin in her hand and kissed him upside down, her hair falling all around them. "You play dirty," she breathed against his mouth._

* * *

Cisco jolted awake and lay panting, staring up at the ceiling.

After a few minutes, he rolled over and buried his face in the pillow, giving serious thought to downing one of the sleeping pills that his doctor had prescribed. Except they always made him sludgy the next day, which he hated. But, they kept the dreams away. So . . . fifty fifty, really.

Not like he'd never had a dream about Caitlin that way before. He'd thought she was hot and pretty and had a beautiful smile the first time they'd met, with Hartley sneering at him, and even though she was dating Ronnie and later engaged to Ronnie, his subconscious had whipped up possibilities. Hell, his subconscious had whipped up possibilities with both of them, because Ronnie in addition to being a pretty awesome guy, wasn't hard on the eyes.

But he'd kept those to himself because friendship trumped libido and he knew where he stood in the order of things.

This hadn't been one of those dreams. This had been another Cisco's world, a timeline that had diverted from the one he stood in right now. There was something about his dips into other realities, a warping of the edges and an intensity of color, that made them so clearly not-dreams that he couldn't fool himself.

Somewhere, somewhere in all the possibilities of all the worlds that could be, Caitlin Snow was soft and warm and happy, and making out with him on a ratty couch.

He pulled his phone out and played a mindless matching game until his eyelids drooped. He let the phone rest on his chest and closed his burning eyes. Sleep, he thought. Sleep.

But the dreams - the other realities - kept pulling him in. He slipped and slid between possibilities.

 _Caitlin walking around the edge of the dance floor in a crowded club, looking wistfully at the dancers._

 _Caitlin sitting on a couch in a red sundress, her damp hair twisted up in a bun, saying in a tremulous voice,_ I just didn't want to keep it from you for any longer.

 _Caitlin cuddling up to Ronnie, alive Ronnie, asking him to tell her about the soccer game on the television._

 _Caitlin and Felicity giggling together over some girly joke._

 _Caitlin in leather, climbing on a motorcycle, looking mildly exasperated and completely badass._

 _Caitlin getting married in a park, her pretty hair spilling over her bared shoulders, holding a bouquet of yellow flowers._

 _Caitlin crouched over his own still body, performing CPR, panting,_ Come on, please. Wake up.

 _Caitlin grousing at Barry in his Flash suit while she plucked what looked like an entire herd of porcupines out of his face and neck._

 _Caitlin arguing with him as he poured chocolate chips into a saucepan, waving her phone at him._

 _Caitlin and Iris at a bar, Iris with a tacky plastic tiara that said "BRIDE," Caitlin yelling for more drinks._

 _Caitlin wrapped around him in a grungy alley, kissing his brains out._

Caitlin happy, Caitlin warm, Caitlin with him.

He sat bolt upright in bed. He rested his forehead on his knees and breathed.

Okay, Caitlin with him, he didn't need that. Really he didn't. (It was . . . nice, though. Just really really . . . nice.)

But Caitlin warm was so hard to see, knowing how cold she always was. That she had to wear a heavy wool coat in the middle of summer, that she jolted away from touching people because just touching someone could kill them. Had killed them.

And seeing her happy, normal, that hurt like something crushing his heart, and he could say that from fucking experience now, okay.

Because those realities weren't this one, and in this one, she was cold and whittled down, all sharp edges like broken ice.

Worst was when the sharp edges slipped aside and occasionally revealed the Caitlin she'd always been. Funny, snarky, a little awkward, just one of his favorite people in the world.

He flopped onto his back again and gave some more thought to a sleeping pill. Just when he'd decided that he couldn't take the dreams again, and climbed out of bed, a thought slammed into him like a hammer.

 _Had they locked Caitlin's cell?_

He wracked his brains, trying to walk backward through the process of shutting things down and leaving. Caitlin had stomped off, he knew that. They usually left her cell unlocked and parked at the mouth of the pipeline when she wasn't in it, so she could go back if she needed to during the day, to warm up until she was safe to be around. At night, he walked her back and locked it behind her. But tonight, he hadn't. Had Barry?

Maybe?

He texted Barry - _did u lock C in?_ \- waited. Nothing. Jerk was probably asleep.

Knowing Barry would bitch endlessly if he knew, and not really caring, Cisco drove back to Star Labs, far too fast for a brown guy in the wee hours of the night. It was that after-midnight time when the roads were empty, but so much before dawn that the eastern horizon was still dark. He parked in his usual spot, up near the front doors. From this angle, he could just about see the skylights that covered the cortex. They gleamed very, very faintly blue.

He breathed in, then out.

He got out of his car and pulled a hoodie he'd lined with space-blanket material out of his backseat. It wouldn't cover everything but it would block the warmest parts of his body, and hopefully that would let him sneak up on her.

Because it was her, in the cortex. He knew it.

He knew her, and he knew she'd come for some other reason than just an implant. He'd known it since she'd agreed to his terms in the Palmer Pharamceuticals warehouse.

He padded soundlessly through the dark halls. No need for a light, not here. He could navigate this place blind.

The cortex glowed blue from the light of a single monitor, lighting up Caitlin's face, scowling, intent, as she tapped away at the keyboard.

"Well," he said. "It took you long enough."

Her head shot up. In the blue glow of the monitor, her throat worked.

He walked into the cortex. "What are you really doing at Star Labs, Caitlin?"


	12. Chapter 12

"I told you," she said. "I need - "

He waved a hand. "An implant, I know. After all those tests, I believe you about that." He was getting miserably hot inside the hoodie, and he unzipped it. Not like he needed its cloaking abilities now. "But you got your hands on the heat gun. You could have lived without an implant. You wouldn't've had to be here, locked in that cell half the time, putting up with me and Barry and Iris. You could have gone off on your own, because I know that's the way you like it."

Her hands clenched on the keyboard. She removed them and pressed them on her knees. "I told you," she said again. "It's very hard on my clothes. "

"And nobody ever removes their clothes, ever."

"I can see that you're determined to be stubborn about this. To believe the worst of me. Go ahead, then. You don't need my help for that."

Sweat trickled down his spine, and he peeled the hoodie off completely, tossing it over a chair. "You've pulled our password six times in the three weeks since you've been here, and there have been at least that many attempts on our servers and firewalls. I've been waiting for you to tell me what the hell is going on, but I'm done now. Give me a reason for that, Caitlin, or I'm going to make one up."

"I don't know what you're talking about."

"The sensors," he snarled. "Do you even know how hard you pull when you're drawing in heat from a computer keyboard?"

"Those are random flares."

"You may be a metahuman, and a criminal, but you still can't tell a lie to save your life. When you have a flare, they trip all three sensors - your cuffs and your core temp. When it's just your right wrist, and you're standing within arms' reach of the workstations - I mean, it doesn't take much to figure out. That's the Killer Frost version of scratching a pencil across a pad of paper to see what was written on the last page."

"Maybe I already got it. What I'm looking for."

"You only have a few passwords. We had a friend rebuild the file structure for us. Trust me, it's labyrinthine, and not just because I always wanted to use that word. All you'll get with what you have is info on your own powers and our work on the implant. That's it. Everything else is walled off. So tell me. What are you hunting around for?"

He thought she would freeze him out. Bad bluffer or not, she was the absolute queen of the deep freeze even before that became quite so literal. She would just clamp her jaw shut and stare you down, and you weren't getting anything out of her until she was damn well ready.

But she rose to her feet. "Fine, you want to know? I'll tell you. I want to know what really happened here that night. And don't say what night. You know what night."

"The - the explosion?"

"I've read everything I could get my hands on about it. Every newspaper article, every expose, every one-year-later review, even the federal accident report."

"How did you get ahold of that?"

She rolled her eyes. "It's public information, and I may not have much, but I have a library card. I downloaded the whole thing, and there are pieces missing. Great gaping holes that you could drive a Mack truck through. It's a giant snore to read and it would fool anybody who wasn't actually working on the project, but I was around this every day for years, and there are pieces missing."

"You said it yourself the other day. It's science, not magic. Things happen. Accidents happen."

"But how? I need to know, Cisco. I need to know why I lost my whole life. I need to know why I'm - this. And - " She took a gulping breath. "I need to know why he died."

"Ronnie," Cisco said.

"Ronnie," she whispered.

"That - really? That's it? That's all?"

Suddenly, shockingly, her eyes filled with tears. "Fuck you," she spat, and whirled.

He sagged against his work table, watching her go, his mind racing.

Why hadn't he just told her? Why had he stuck with the "accident" line when he knew better?

He knew. He knew perfectly well.

Swearing that she had some nefarious plan, refusing to call her his friend. He'd been a jerk. A complete asshole, for nothing she'd actually done. All this time, he'd been punishing her for Thawne's crimes. He'd been treating her like she was the one who'd tricked him, betrayed him.

Killed him.

But that wasn't her. She'd never lied to him, not once. Sure, she'd kept some things back. But why would she tell him? Why would she share that with him, when he'd been treating her like crap ever since she'd turned up in the cortex with her deal and her favor?

"Caitlin!" he yelled. " _Caitlin, wait_!"

* * *

She heard his footsteps as he thundered down the corridors after her. She upped her fast walk to a run, her cheeks crackling with frozen tears.

 _That's it?_ he'd asked, the skepticism spilling off him. _That's all?_

As if that wasn't enough. As if hunting down the reason for the world she'd lost was just nothing. But she was Killer Frost, right? She had to have some villainous reason. Some criminal motive. That was what she was now.

Killer Frost.

She scrambled for the safety and the warmth of her cell. She needed to spend some time in there, thaw out, sort out her mind, and then she was leaving. There had to be other ways to get what she needed. She didn't have to put herself through this, being in this place all day and all night, haunted by the ghosts of her old life, including the man who'd once been her friend.

She wasn't that Caitlin anymore, and Cisco wasn't that Cisco anymore either.

She spun to shut her door, but Cisco was ahead of her, slapping the panel and jumping into the cell behind her. The door clanked closed and the whole cell began moving, rumbling away from the mouth of the pipeline.

"What are you doing?"

"Making sure you can't run away from me, or freeze me - Caitlin. God. I'm sorry. I'm so fucking sorry."

Her tears melted and refroze on her cheeks. Her powers were going wild. She pressed herself back into the corner. "Stay where you are."

"I am. I promise. But I know your powers, and I know this cell, and I promise you, I will be okay." The cell clanked to a stop, looking out on a vista of grey pipeline.

Cisco turned his back on it, his face to her. "I need to tell you this, and I'm sorry I didn't before, and - " He stumbled to a halt. "The explosion."

Her fingers curled against the wall. "You do know what happened."

He pressed his lips together. "I think you do, too."

"Of course I don't. What have we been talking about?"

"But you know it wasn't an accident."

She swallowed. "No. It was sabotage."

She'd known that from her first read-through of the deadly dull federal report, and even when she wondered if she was casting around for someone or something to blame when it had been a horrible coincidence, she'd known she was right.

"The thing I don't know," she continued, "is who or why, and you do, don't you?"

He didn't answer, not directly. "Who do you think is to blame?"

"Someone on the inside, it had to be. Someone who knew the project. Someone was bribed, or lied their way in, or - " She rubbed her eyes. "If I knew, would I be searching?"

"You remember what security was like. You practically signed away your first-born child with the employment contracts. And even when we started working, we were in silos. We were kept so separate. You and Ronnie, you were about the closest contact any of the different departments had with each other."

Yes. She remembered that. Separate break rooms, different shift times, individual department parties instead of company-wide ones. All the little rivalries, magnified, all the petty competitions, egged on.

"There was only one person who knew enough about the whole project to sabotage it. You know who that person was."

"That's impossible," she said automatically. But ice trickled through her veins, in defiance of the beautiful warmth of her cell.

"Why?"

"Because," she said, as if to a child. "Because this was his baby. His dream. His life's work. The most important thing he would ever do. You remember that? You remember him saying that? What, was he lying?"

"No," Cisco said, face drawn and grey. "No, he wasn't. Harrison Wells just wasn't giving us the whole truth."

The ice spread from her stomach, up into her throat.

"Caitlin," he said. He put out a hand, and she pressed herself harder into the corner as the mist spilling from her skin reached out toward him. "Cait. His life's work wasn't the accelerator. _It was the explosion_."

"No," she said automatically. "Why? No."

"For the Flash. He brought us all here, handpicked us, mentored us, so we could build the accelerator, so he could destroy it - to make the Flash."

Her breath came in gasps, bitter cold chunks tumbling through her lungs. "All of that, for one person? Why? It destroyed so much. People died. People were - changed." She gulped. "Ronnie."

He shook his head, tears in his eyes. "Collateral damage. That's all."

She gasped, feeling ice spread down her arms and legs. She could feel her eyes freezing, her hair, her mouth. Her knees weren't too frozen to give out, and she folded down to the floor.

He reached for her.

"No! No. Don't. Please don't." She couldn't live with herself if -

His hands dropped away. He crouched on the floor a few feet away, his hands curling and uncurling on his knees. The ice that swam in her eyes warped and distorted his form. She bowed her head, pressing her hands to the floor. The ice fell, shattered, was followed by more. Mist spilled off her skin.

Harrison Wells.

Harrison Wells who had hired her away from the military complex where she was working, unhappy, unfulfilled, seriously doubtful about the value of what she was doing. _Come to Star Labs_ , he'd said, eyes alight with a missionary's zeal. _Help me change the world._

Harrison Wells, who'd thrown them an engagement party at a fancy restaurant, springing for champagne and veal and the best of everything, when she and Ronnie had been worried that one of them was going to be fired.

Harrison Wells, who'd talked about how they were serving mankind.

He had sabotaged this place, this work, that they had all poured so much of themselves into. He'd led them, mentored them, encouraged them. Dragged their best out of them. And then he'd taken that best and thrown it into a pit of filth. The explosion had been his aim.

Collateral damage.

It was as if he'd fired a gun at Ronnie's head himself.

No. No, it wasn't. It was as if he'd casually fired a gun and not looked around to see it hitting someone. Hitting Ronnie. Goofy, sweet Ronnie, who made her chocolate chip pancakes on Sunday mornings and never replaced the soap when the soap dispenser ran out in the bathroom and had a taste for overblown romantic gestures that she managed to enjoy because he meant them, he did, the flowers and the chocolates and the unabashedly sentimental anniversaries that she would never have with him again.

The cold devoured her, invaded every cell, every ligament. She would freeze solid, and there she would stay, like the bodies sometimes found in the mountains or in glaciers, perfectly preserved after thousands of years by the bitter, bitter cold.

The cell wouldn't let her.

Cisco's cell poured out warmth, surrounding her. No matter how much her damaged body drank in, there was always more heat. She closed her eyes and screamed. Her rage and her sorrow reverberated from the walls. She pressed herself into a tighter ball, wrapped around her icy center.

The cell - the heat - cradled her like arms.

Gradually, the first rage of sorrow receded, until she felt like a thin sheet of black ice covering bitter-cold water, a breath from shattering or melting. She blinked a few times, breathing in gasps. Her tears no longer froze on her cheeks, but ran freely, splashing to the floor, melting patches in the frost that surrounded her. She watched the frost numbly, the white particles glittering on the metal. For a little bit, the edges fluctuated wildly, melting and re-freezing, and then they began to retreat, creeping back toward her body as the heat began to penetrate.

At her wrists, the sensors blinked backward from ten dots to nine.

She lifted her head.

Cisco had retreated, back to the opposite corner, but still not far enough or close enough for her liking.

"How?" she croaked.

He lifted his eyes to hers. He blinked, and two tears ran down his face, in the tracks from the ones that had already soaked into his t-shirt.

"How could you stay?" she demanded.

"I didn't know." His voice scraped raw. "I didn't, I promise. For nearly a year I thought it really had been an accident."

"But when you found out - "

"When I found out, there was Barry, and I had to stay. So we could beat him."

"Wells."

". . . yes."

She caught the hesitation, and realized that he hadn't actually answered her earlier question. Why would Wells do this?

Had Barry had anything to do with it?

But no. She rejected that point-blank. She didn't know Barry well, but she thought she knew enough to realize that he'd had as little to do with his own transformation as she had with hers. His reaction to the real source, the real reason, would have been shock, horror, guilt, and a determination to make things right.

Stupid boy. You couldn't make this right. Nobody could make this right.

She drew her knees up and pressed her face into them, listening to her own breathing. She felt empty.

She'd wanted answers. Hadn't she?

She didn't know anymore.

She watched the frost dissolve into shining damp patches, then evaporate under the scorching wind from the heaters. She lifted her head again and wiped her face with her hand. "Cisco. You should go."

"I can't."

He was damp with sweat, skin glowing red, hair matted against his neck. Patches of dampness showed under his arms and at the neck of his t-shirt. In her heat sense, he was so deliciously bright that the cold lunged toward him, whimpering like a hungry wolf just out of reach of a plate of meat.

She gripped her arms hard to keep herself where she was. "You're very warm. These heaters have been blasting to keep up with me." She waved a hand. "Send the cell back to the mouth of the pipeline and go back home for the rest of the night."

She didn't want him to. But he couldn't be in here; he couldn't be around her. Not like this.

He shook his head. "No, I can't do that."

She rested her head on her knees again, closing her eyes. "I know you want to stay with me. And I'm grateful, I am, but think rationally. It's a sauna in here, by design. Your design. A regular person isn't meant to be in these temperatures for very long. You're courting heatstroke here, and I'm not talking about getting a little sweaty and dehydrated."

"I am thinking rationally, and I know this is dangerous, but I can't leave."

"Don't be ridiculous," she said wearily, eyes still closed. "You have to have something on your phone, some way of talking to the servers, that you can unlock this cell."

"I do. But my phone's in the pocket of my hoodie, and that's lying on a table in the cortex."

She opened her eyes to stare at him. "What?"

He smiled weakly. "I - uh. I think I'm trapped."


	13. Chapter 13

Cisco watched Caitlin examine the door narrowly, occasionally pressing her hand to the joints, the lock.

"It's a prison," he said patiently. "I built it to contain you. That door's not going to pop open because you kick it the right way. It especially isn't going to pop open if you try to freeze it. Don't you think I thought of that?"

She didn't stop what she was doing. "You need to get out of here."

"Look," he said, shoving his hand under his hair and lifting it off his neck. He dug around in his pocket and found a rubber band, so he could wrestle the thick mass into a knot. Sweat rolled down his spine and pooled in the small of his back. "It's not that long until morning. Barry will be back. He'll notice my car in the lot and when he can't find me inside, he'll come looking. It's not like there's that many places I could be."

"It's long enough for heatstroke! How are you not more concerned?" She pointed at the heaters around the perimeter of the cell. "Those are pouring out heat right now, to compensate for my cold flare. It's hotter than Death Valley in here."

"Yeah, but I'm in this cell with you. You're balancing it out."

"It will do you no good to get hypothermia instead."

He pushed himself up and went to the bathroom. She had a stack of mugs sitting on the floor, next to one of the heater grilles. He tried to pick one up and had to let go - the ceramic was as hot as a flame against his fingers. He used his shirt as a guard and filled it with water from the sink. He dumped it over his head and it flowed, soupy warm, down over his face and soaked into his hair and his shirt. It helped a little. He filled it again and held it out. "Come on. Do me up some ice water."

She glared at him, but it was the old Caitlin glare. The I-can't-believe-you're-such-an-idiot glare. She took the mug in her bare fingers and held it.

The mug cracked, and then shattered. Shards of ice and ceramic spilled to the floor.

She glared at it. The lights at her wrists vacillated between nine and eight.

She skirted around him and filled the next mug herself. She set it down on the edge of the sink, took a steadying breath, then wrapped her hands around the mug. Cisco watched the lights and saw them blink back to seven.

"Here." She handed him the mug, making sure their fingers didn't touch.

Cold. _Cold._ He pressed it against his cheeks, his throat, his forehead, until the biting chill was gone, and then he drank.

"Slowly," she said in her most doctory voice, picking up the pieces of the first mug. "Or you'll get sick."

He took mouthfuls of water, held them in his mouth until the coolness was gone, then swallowed.

"You're better," she said, when he'd finished the water, and he wondered what she saw in her heat sense. "But I'm still not happy. You should take off your shirt."

He didn't raise any objections. The cloth was gross, clammy without being cold, stuck to his skin with sweat and warm water, and peeling it off elicited a moan of relief.

"And your shoes and socks. And your pants."

"My pants?"

"Removing unnecessary clothing, Cisco. Heat relief 101."

"My pants are extremely necessary!" But he kicked off his shoes and socks, and rolled up his pants to the knee. All that exposed skin felt so good that he actually did consider for a moment how necessary his pants were. But - yeah, no, totally keeping the pants.

She huffed with exasperation and took the mug out of his hands to fill and cool it again. He pressed it against his jugular when she handed it back. "Where's the coolest place in this cell?"

"The door. Just by a little."

He should know that. Why didn't he know that? What were the symptoms of heatstroke?

He slid down to sit with his back against the tempered glass of the door. It was still uncomfortably warm against his skin, but there weren't any heaters on this wall, at least. He dropped his head back to rest against the glass. He drank the rest of his water, slowly, and when he'd finished, his head had cleared some.

She sat down opposite him, her back against the wall, so they were at eye level but separated by the width of the cell. Her eyes burned for a moment before she looked away.

He said, "Ask."

Her eyes came back to him. They still burned. "Why? Why would Harrison Wells want to make the Flash so badly?"

He rested the mug, still cool, on his knee. "I don't know where to start."

"At the beginning and go forward."

"Except the beginning goes backward."

"Cisco!"

"I'm not fucking with you, I swear. This whole story is like that." He pushed his hands through his hair. It squeaked with water and sweat. Ugh. "Okay. It wasn't Harrison Wells, is the first thing. It was an imposter."

He saw her eyes light, then her frown start. "How long?"

"Right from the start. He posed as Wells for fifteen years. We never knew the real Harrison Wells. Not one of us."

She closed her eyes for a moment. "Then it doesn't make any difference, does it? Who was he?"

"His name was Eobard Thawne, and he came from the future because he hated Barry Allen."

He told her the story of the time-traveler, caught in his own web, forced to create the man he'd loathed. She listened, pale, rigid, her hands locked together, the lights flashing on her wrists.

When his voice crackled into silence, he watched the mist spilling and swirling off her skin.

"Does it make it easier? Knowing why?" he asked.

She lifted her eyes. "Does it for you?"

He shook his head.

But the funny thing was, telling it to her had made it easier. Like sharing a burden. He couldn't tell Barry this, not and have him understand. He couldn't explain how deep it had cut. He could say it had, and Barry would say, _Yeah, man, I know_ and they would both get it when the other one went quiet and sullen for an afternoon.

But they were going quiet for different reasons.

Caitlin knew. Caitlin had the closest thing to the same experience. Caitlin had so many of the same memories of Wells' inspiring speeches, his quiet words of encouragement on a bad day, his eyes glowing with his vision of a different world . . .

A world that was far more different than anyone could have guessed.

"Do you think he knew?" she asked. "Who would die? Who would b-be changed?"

"No," Cisco said right away. "He was changing time. He was speeding things up. It wasn't supposed to happen like this, not for years."

"What do you think happened in the other time? The one where everything was where it was supposed to be?"

"I don't know," he said, and he was telling the truth. So many different worlds raced through his cranium on a nightly basis that it was near impossible to tell which one was the "real" one. The original.

She chilled more water. "I still don't understand how you're so okay with being trapped in here."

"It's proof of concept," he said, closing his eyes. His head swam.

"Oh, well, that'll be a lot of comfort when the seizures start. I can't believe you wouldn't build something in here, Cisco. Some back door. Some failsafe."

"I don't want to be able to get out."

"Why? Because that means I won't be able to?"

Still with his eyes closed, he said, "Because one day, Barry might have to put me in here and when he does, I really, really would rather not be able to get out."

The silence stretched.

"Cisco," she said in a hushed voice. " _Cisco_."

He tried to smile. It felt like it might crack his face. "So now you know. Iris West is the only human left at Star Labs."

He opened his eyes. She was looking at him like he'd just told her he had six months left to live. "What is it?" she asked. "Your - what is it?"

"I don't exactly know. That's the worst part." He looked away. He wasn't sure what to make of that look on her face. "I've been having these dreams. Except not dreams."

"Is that why you never seem to sleep?"

"I don't want to sleep."

"What do they do? These not-dreams."

"They're dips into other timelines. I see things the way they might have been. The way they aren't. I see - I see too much." He shook his head. "And he told me. Thawne. He said I could see through the vibrations of the universe."

"What does that even mean?"

"I have no idea!" he cried. "And then he said I had a great and honorable destiny. He said that. I can't even imagine what he could consider great and honorable. After what he did, I don't want to imagine."

Her hand went out. She pulled it back. "Did he say anything else?"

Cisco heard his voice tremble. "Not to be afraid."

"What does Barry think?"

"I haven't told him."

"Why not?"

He twisted the mug. "Because all the other metahumans we've gone up against have ended up - " He broke off, looking away.

"Finish it, Cisco," she said.

"Have ended up crazy, evil, or dead."

She nodded and stood. "Well. I don't think I'm crazy." She went to the sink and started running water again, filling mugs.

He pushed himself to his feet. "You're not evil."

She turned and smiled at him, a thin glittering smile like the edge of an ice knife. "What does that leave? Dead?"

"You're - you. You're Caitlin."

She shook her head. "I'm Killer Frost."

"No, you're not!"

She swept her hand over the mugs and they crackled up with ice, frost coating the outsides. "I could do this to you. Tell me, does that sound crazy or evil? Which one?"

As hot as he was, that sounded awfully appealing. "I'm trying to find a fourth option!"

"You clearly don't think there is one, or you wouldn't be so devastated about your own status."

"Don't you think there's one? Why else would you come here?"

"For the truth about the explosion. And because it's not as if I have anything left to lose." She crossed her arms. "Drink your water. It must be getting warm."

He did, thinking hard. When he'd drained the mug, he narrowed his eyes at her. "What were you planning to do once you got the truth?"

She glared at him, then went to sit on her bed, back turned toward the bathroom. "Go to the toilet," she said. "Tell me the color. Then drink more water."

Really, nobody had ever been able to say _fuck off_ quite as eloquently or uniquely as Caitlin Snow.


	14. Chapter 14

(A/N) I changed the rating for safety's sake, since things get a little mature at the end of this one. If you want to skip it, you can jump to the last line once things start getting heated.

* * *

He reported back that his pee had been yellow but not too dark. In any other situation he would have been embarrassed and made jokes. He was still embarrassed, but Caitlin had always been so matter-of-fact about the human body that it felt silly.

She said, "Drink the water. Slowly."

He downed another mug full and used his shirt to wipe the sweat away. "Hey, at least I'm still sweating. That's good, right?" Stopping sweating was a bad sign. He was pretty sure he'd heard that somewhere.

"Your electrolytes are going to be severely imbalanced if this keeps up. I don't have anything to give you." She worried her bottom lip.

He pressed the fourth mug against his jugular and thought of how easily she'd drawn the heat out, frosting it up like a windowpane at Christmas. Damn. Christmas, cold, snow, icy wind. Mmmmm. "Show me your wrists."

She looked over her shoulder at him, then held out one hand.

"Four," he said. "That's not that much. You could - "

"No."

"Caitlin, what's my core temperature right now?"

She looked away.

"Well? I know you can tell me to within a tenth of a degree."

"A hundredth," she said. "You're at thirty-nine point eight . . . " She looked him up and down. "Two, I'd say. Possibly three."

"When does heatstroke occur?"

"It varies. Anywhere from forty to forty-four degrees."

Yeah. He felt like he could cook an egg on his skin. "Water's not doing it, Caitlin."

"Splash it over your skin. Evaporative cooling."

"The fans are blasting hot air."

"It'll still help."

"For, like, a tenth of a second."

"Do you know what I did to the first man I touched after I woke up?"

"Yes," he said. "I found him."

She went white.

"I found him," he said, more softly. "And then I saw you wake up on the security tapes. I saw you do it."

"And you still - "

"That was a year and a half ago. You'd been in a coma. You were starving for heat; you weren't in control. You've spent the last several weeks around all of us without once giving anybody so much as frostbite. I just watched you chill an entire set of mugs, but stop short of freezing them solid, while you were fighting with me."

"And before that, I broke one."

"When you were at nine lights. You're at four. You don't need to touch me. We've all felt the cold rolling off you on bad days. It's better than an air conditioner. Just get close enough to help. Caitlin, please."

He held her gaze. She still looked pale. He felt a bead of sweat trickle from his temple. Her eyes followed it down his face until it rolled onto his neck and soaked into the fine sheen of sweat that coated his throat.

"I'll do it from here," she said. "And if I start to - if I - "

"I'll throw this mug at you," he promised.

That actually seemed to reassure her. Biting her lip, she raised both hands and spread her fingers toward him.

For a moment, he thought she wasn't doing anything, and then a breeze whispered along his skin. He caught his breath.

"Cisco?"

"Don't!" he said. "Don't stop. It feels so good."

He could feel the heat whispering away, light and delicate, as if she were peeling thin wool blankets off his body one by one. He shuddered, hard.

Her eyes were half-closed, with just a hint of blue glittering between the lids. Too soon, she clenched her hands closed and set them down on her knees.

Dizzy with the incredible chilly pleasure, he said, "Am I - ?"

"Thirty-seven degrees," she said. "For now."

He said, "Show me your sensors."

She turned her wrist toward him. They'd gone down to three.

He considered them, and said, "Is body heat more efficient somehow?"

"I think it must be. There's no reason for it. Heat is heat, but it's always been like that," she said quietly. "From the moment I - I woke up."

"You remember that?"

"I remember cold, and the machine - it was like a beacon. That was my heat sense. I didn't know what it was exactly, but I knew I needed to get to it. There was something else, another heat source, further away, but I couldn't reach it."

 _Barry_ , he thought, and if it had been possible he would have broken out in a cold sweat.

"Then he came in." She looked at her hands, twisting them to stare intently at the sensors. "I wish that I could say I didn't even recognize him as human, but I did. I knew he was a person. But I also knew he was warm and I was cold and I - " She closed her eyes. "Cisco, I - "

"I know," he said. "It's okay. You don't have to tell me."

They were quiet together. She stirred.

"You're starting to warm up again."

"I noticed," he said. "It's faster than I thought."

She flexed her hands.

"What are your sensors at?" he asked her.

"Three, still."

"The third is blinking. You could touch me."

She went rigid.

"Just a little. Just - " he held out his wrists. "Here. On the pulse point. You'll be drawing it right out of my skin. More efficient, right? Less loss."

She stared at his wrist, at the criss-crossing tracks of veins blue-green under his skin. "I touched you there before."

That was the last time she'd touched anybody, he thought. All those months ago. Cut off from anybody and everybody by the danger of her own body. He looked down at the scar. "It's not like that. It's different."

She cupped her hand over his wrist and slowly slowly closed it. When her skin touched his, he was tense as she was. Her touch burned like an ice cube against his skin. Coolness lapped up his arm. He let out his breath with a tiny moan.

She jerked away, fingers curled into her palm.

"It's okay, it's okay."

"No, I - "

"You didn't." He wiggled his wrist, a little red from the intense cold but otherwise perfectly fine. "See? It's okay. I'll let you know if it's not."

She put her hand over it again. He breathed out the visceral pleasure of it. They stayed like that for a few minutes, the heat draining out from him into her, before she pulled her hand away.

She didn't scoot back.

"Tell me about the nurse," she said. "Tell me who he was."

"What do you already know?"

"His name was Justin Yazzie. He was born in Arizona, near Flagstaff. He spent time in the Marines as a medic, then went to nursing school after he got out. He wasn't married but his parents were still alive, and he had a brother, and two nieces and a nephew."

He frowned. "That's a lot of intel, there. Do you, like, absorb things along with the heat?" What could she have absorbed from him?

She shook her head. "I told you. I have a library card. I got into the CCPN archives. I read his obituary."

He swallowed, and then told her about the Justin he'd barely known himself. How he'd moved to Central City looking for work, been hired as a night nurse by Wells, had been hoping to get into the public health department. How he'd been flirting shyly with his next-door neighbor, trying to get up the courage to ask for her phone number.

She told him about the other two people - Phillip Ross, who'd lived through Kuwait and Iraq in the early 90s but fought a harder battle with PTSD and alcoholism before picking the wrong subway to huddle in, one bitter night. "I don't know much," she said. "I had to dig for that much. It doesn't make news, a homeless man freezing to death in January."

Vanessa Edelstein had been more high-profile, because it had been so strange. A mother and wife, dead of acute hypothermia on a March morning that had been unexpectedly balmy.

"I went to her funeral," she said. "I put a stone on her grave. Is that sick?"

"I don't know," he said. He could picture Caitlin, standing awkwardly at the edge of the crowd, several feet away from anybody else, wrapped up in her long white coat, or an inky black version of it. Maybe sneaking forward after everyone was gone to lay a pebble on the grave, lost among all the flowers. "No. It wasn't sick. It was . . . respectful."

She looked away.

He asked, not entirely sure he wanted to hear the answer, "Were there others?"

"Nobody else that I killed. I was trying. I was trying not to - I know some of them had to go to the hospital."

Cisco wondered how many of them had been picked up by EMTs after an anonymous 911 call.

"Where did you go?" he asked her. "After you left here."

"Underground. Literally."

He stared at her, horrified. "Like - the sewers?"

"And the subways. It was warm." She avoided his eyes. "It wasn't for long. Summer came, and things were better, and I started taking the drugs."

He started to ask where she'd gotten them, and how she knew which ones to take, and she said, "Your core temperature's gone back up, Cisco. I want to try something."

"Go ahead."

She put one hand on his shoulder, shuffling forward a little on her knees. She cupped her hand around his neck, cool and soft on his vulnerable throat. He breathed in the cool air that swam around her - bliss.

"You're still warm," she said, and her voice trembled.

"Go ahead, take it, I don't need it," he joked feebly.

She made a face at him, very briefly, and they stayed like that for several minutes. She dropped her hands but stayed where she was. They were inches apart now.

At her wrist, one light burned and one blinked gently. Blink - blink - blink - and it went dark.

"What was it like here?" she asked him.

"Everyone left," he whispered. "Everyone - everyone was gone. They were dead or they quit or they left town, even. Just Barry, in a coma, and - _him._ "

"What was he like? After the explosion."

"He was quiet, a lot. He spent a lot of time looking after Barry, or just alone. I didn't know where. I left him alone because I thought, holy shit, how much it sucked to be him right now, so if he wanted to be left alone, that was cool."

"What was he doing?"

"God only knows."

"What did you do?"

"Anything I could think of. I fixed things and I built things and . . . God, Caitlin. I thought I was going to lose my mind from loneliness."

"You stayed. Why?"

He closed his eyes. "I thought he needed me."

Slowly, slowly, as if every inch had to be considered, planned, executed before the next one could even be contemplated, she settled against his chest. One hand rested against his shoulder, fingers loosely curled, angled so she was looking right at the last blinking light on her wrist.

That last light. She'd never had so much warmth that it was blinking before, but now it was. Any other time, he would have been punching the air and crowing. But now he just shifted, pulling one knee up and curling the other leg around her so she was cradled in them. His arms slipped around her, and he rested his forehead against her hair.

"I missed you," he said.

She didn't respond, but she burrowed deeper into his arms. They stayed like that for a long time. It should have felt strange, basically cuddling with a woman he'd been telling himself he didn't like and didn't trust fro the past several weeks, if not months. It didn't. It felt like something had quietly slipped into place, something that never should have been knocked askew at all.

He glanced at her wrist and saw the last light blink to darkness, and stay dark.

"Cisco?" she said quietly.

He angled his head to look at her. "Yeah?"

She kissed him.

She was frozen lemonade on the hottest day of summer, tart and sweet. She was aloe vera on sunburnt skin. She was the moment the air kicked on, after the power had gone out on a stifling August night.

He pulled away. "Caitlin?"

Her mouth was damp and soft from his, and her eyes were filled with trepidation and desire. "It's been so long since anybody touched me," she breathed out. "I - please. Cisco. Touch me."

He kissed her back.

They drank each other in. Her cool hands stroked over his skin, his shoulders, his arms, his back. She buried her face in his neck, pressing her lips to his throat. When he slid his hands under her shirt, sliding them up over her stomach, her ribs, cupping her breasts through the thin fabric of her bra, she let out a small, needy noise. "Let me - " She rose up on her knees, breaking the kiss, and straddled him, pressing herself down onto his growing erection.

He gasped against her throat and pulled back long enough to shove her shirt up above her breasts. She pulled it the rest of the way off herself, and dipped her head long enough to kiss him again, long and hungry. His fingers fumbled at the clasp of her bra.

The speaker boomed. "Caitlin! Caitlin, do you know where Cisco is?"


	15. Chapter 15

They both went still. She looked down at him and very, very quietly said the first thing that came to mind. "Video?"

"Disabled," he said in a similar tone. "A long time ago."

"Caitlin!" Barry called over the speaker again. "I'm sorry, I know you're sleeping, but - "

They both sighed, and he let his head drop forward to rest against her collarbone a moment.

"Caitlin!"

"He's here," she called out.

At the same time, he said, "It's okay, man, I'm in here."

"Cisco? In the cell? How did that happen?"

"Long story. Would you just get down to the pipe - "

There was a clank, and the cell lurched.

" - line," Cisco finished, and mouthed, _Shit!_

Caitlin scrambled off his lap, fumbling for her bra. It didn't take long for her cell to move to the mouth of the pipeline and there was little to no chance that Barry wouldn't be peering in anxiously. If she didn't move fast, he was going to get an eyeful.

As she did, Cisco was scrabbling around for his shoes and socks. He shook out his wrinkled shirt before folding it over his arm.

"Shouldn't you put it on?" she asked, pulling her own shirt right-side-out and dragging it over her head.

"Trust me, I'm better off holding it," he hissed.

She remembered the feel of him, pressing between her legs, and would have blushed if she could have.

With another lurch, the cell clicked into place, and the doors unlatched and opened. Cisco gasped with relief as the cool air washed over him. Caitlin stepped back, closer to the heaters, and wrapped her arms around herself.

Right. Of course. The heat that supported her could have killed him.

"Cisco? What happened? Why are you here? Why's your shirt off?" Barry looked stern. "How early were you here this morning?"

"It was an accident," Cisco said.

"He needs hydration and electrolytes," Caitlin said steadily, retreating into doctor mode. "He nearly got heatstroke."

"He what? How do you accidentally get trapped in a prison cell?" Barry wanted to know.

"I told you, long story. Caitlin, I'm feeling better."

"Wonderful. Hydrate and replace your electrolytes anyway. And go home."

"We tried that," Barry said. "Clearly it didn't take."

"Then go lie down on the couch in the break room."

Cisco smirked at her, the way he used to. Before. "Which one should I do, doc?"

"Both," she ordered.

"I'll run out for Gatorade," Barry said. "Cisco - "

"I know, I'm going. Honest to god, the two of you are like my _tias._ "

Barry started to hit the lock, and Cisco caught his wrist. "Y'know what? Leave it. Just leave it."

"Wha - " Barry looked between the two of them. "Really?"

"Yeah." He looked over her shoulder and gave her a little smile.

Flustered, frustrated, and emotionally wrung out as she was, Caitlin smiled back.

Then she closed the door to keep the warmth in and went to sit on her bed. She'd shower and change soon, absolutely. She had things to do and things to think about. But for now . . .

She closed her eyes and wrapped her blankets around herself, remembering what it had been like to have his hands on her skin.

* * *

Cisco twitched awake and lay blinking at the carpet in the Star Labs break room for awhile. It took him a moment to realize that what had jerked him out of sleep was the buzz of his phone against his hip. He rolled to his back, careful to avoid the demon couch spring, and dug it out. It was a message from Barry.

 _U up yet? What kind of burrito?_

 **Where u going,** he texted back

 _TG_

 **CA super, thx** After a moment, he added, ** & chips/guac**

 _Hungry much?_

 **4 Caitlin**

Whatever Barry thought about that, he just wrote back _10-4, 20 min? Gotta finish some tests_

 **OK**

He peeled himself off the couch. He felt vaguely sore and he had to pee like a racehorse. Probably due to drinking an entire bottle of Gatorade before he'd crashed. But otherwise, pretty good, considering.

He hadn't dreamed, either.

After he went to the bathroom, he went to the cortex. Caitlin was already there, head bent over a tablet, squinting at something on the screen.

He stood looking at her. Same Caitlin, with the straight posture and the trick of twisting her hair over her shoulder, her lower lip caught softly between her teeth as she studied what was on the screen. How many times had he seen her like this?

She tucked her hair behind her ears and the lights at her wrist blinked.

"Hey," he said, although he was pretty sure she knew he was there. That heat sense and all.

She looked up. "Hey."

She didn't exactly smile, but it was the kind of not-smile she used to give him, back when he would drag her out of her lab for lunch - "Oh my god, Caitlin, you have to leave these four walls, for serious" - or sit down by her at the bar so they could both watch Ronnie play darts, which he was epically bad at. It felt good to see it again.

"How are you feeling?"

"Fine," he said, hefting a bottle of water. "All hydrated and everything."

She nodded. "Okay."

He went to his worktable and tugged open a drawer, rummaging around its contents for a minute. He pulled out a mini Snickers, then paused before closing it. He rummaged again for a moment before finally shutting it and going over to where she sat. "Here."

"Mmm?" She looked up, then blinked at the tiny Krackel he'd set down in front of her. She picked it up, twisted it in her fingers, then lifted her eyes. "Thank you."

He smiled a little at her, awkwardly, and ripped open his own treat. "So, um, how are you doing? This morning."

She rocked her hand in the air, like, _eh_. She looked at her wrists, then showed them to him. Four lights, with a fifth one blinking.

"How long have you been out of the cell?" He went and picked his tablet up off the desk, checking the graphs.

"Three hours."

"That's a slower loss than usual. You did say body heat was more efficient."

"Well, yes, but obviously, trapping someone in my cell and risking heatstroke so I can draw out their excess body heat is not a sustainable solution."

"It wasn't all bad," he said, looking up at her.

She looked back, biting her lip. "No."

He felt himself blushing. Oh. Oh man. This was . . . this was really bad timing for all his old feelings to wake up again.

"I need to say something," she said abruptly.

"I was thinking," he said at the same time.

They both stopped.

He made a gesture. "You go."

"Two things, actually. First, I wanted to thank you."

"For what?"

"For being honest with me. Telling me the truth."

"Uh, after abandoning you for a year and a half, and then treating you like crap when you did come to me for help? Trust me, honesty was the absolute least I could do."

"You didn't abandon me. I pushed you away." She glanced at his wrist. "Literally."

He shook his head. "I always thought I was the kind of person who wouldn't turn his back on his friends no matter what. It's kind of rough to realize I'm not."

She made an exasperated noise. "Because, _once_ , you prioritized yourself and what you had to deal with over somebody who didn't want you around? Please, Cisco, put away the hair shirt, would you? You're not a waste of a human being yet."

"I prioritized Wells over you." He gritted his teeth. "Speaking of a waste of a human being."

"You didn't know. And add Barry in that mix, too. You were getting the Flash - "

"Up to speed?"

"How long have you been waiting to use that?"

"Mmmm, long time."

She wrinkled her nose at him. He grinned back. "You said two things. Was there something else?"

"Yes," she said. "About what happened. Before Barry let you out."

"Oh, that." Was his voice too casual? It sounded too casual.

He'd kind of relived that kiss a lot before he fell asleep - the taste of her mouth and the touch of her cool hands and the softness of her skin.

It was one of those things, he decided. One of those crazy things that happened between people with a lot of history and a lot of emotion and it had been a rough sort of night all around and probably she would want to forget about it.

So he said all that. "Look, it was one of those things, okay? We don't have to talk about it."

"No?"

"Nope. We can forget about it. Chalk it up to wacky heatstroke brain hijinks and move on. I'm gonna make coffee."

"No."

"Oh, come on. I know you think my coffee is terrible - "

"Your coffee is terrible, but that's not what I'm saying no to. I don't want to forget about it. I kissed you, and you kissed me back. And I don't know what I think about that right now but I don't want to forget about it. Move over, I'm making the coffee."

He was so stunned he set the coffee pot down without a fight, even though Caitlin's idea of coffee was hot water that somebody had waved a coffee bean at.

"I'm not going to jump you," she said. "Don't worry. Your virtue is safe."

"My virtue is not that virtuous," he said. "Um - "

"We don't have to talk about it right now," she said, scowling as she filled the pot. "I'm just saying I don't want to pretend it never happened. Let's change the subject."

"Sure," he said. "Let's do that." He picked up his tablet, trying to get his confused brain in some kind of order. It felt like a lost cause.

After all that, the proximity alarm, announcing Barry's arrival, came as a huge relief. They both instinctively grabbed for the nearest loose papers as he whooshed in. "Hey guys! I bring burritos." Barry hoisted one of the Taco Galaxy bags he held.

"Awesome!" Cisco said, far too heartily.

"Uh, yes," she said, head down over the coffee pot. "Thank you."

"Okay, carne asada," Barry said, distributing burritos like the Deliciousness Fairy. "And Caitlin, I got you a chicken one, and chips and guacamole."

"Oh, I thought they'd stopped doing that," Caitlin said. "Well. I guess I'll eat it if nobody else does."

Barry opened his mouth, and Cisco shook his head. "She'll eat it," he said in a low voice, grinning at her back. "She always does."

"Since when?" Barry whispered to him.

"Since always."

Unwrapping her burrito, Caitlin asked him, "So what was your idea? You were about to tell me."

"Oh yeah! I think this might solve the overloading problem we've been having."

Her eyes narrowed. "Go on."

* * *

"It was weird," Barry reported to Iris at Joe's that night. "Like a switch flipped."

"What happened in that cell?"

"He said they just talked."

"Well, okay. I'm guessing they had a lot to talk about."

"I guess."

"They were friends," she said to him. "And they worked at Star Labs. They had a lot in common. You didn't see him after she disappeared." Iris frowned briefly, wishing that she'd been quick enough to put together the weird frozen-solid death of Justin Yazzie with Caitlin Snow's disappearance from her hospital bed at Star Labs. But how could she have? She hadn't even been thinking of journalism then. She hadn't been thinking of anything but Barry. And the weirdness in Central City had barely been starting up.

Still. _Man._

"Anyway, he was devastated. He'd just lost one of his best friends in the explosion and then he lost another. Getting one of them back? He has to feel kind of like I did when you woke up."

"Yeah, I know all that, but at one point I swear they weren't using verbs."

"Now you know what it feels like," Joe said, coming into the living room.

"Funny, Daddy," Iris said. "You outta here?"

"I'm going to bowling," he said, looking at them sitting together on the couch. "You want me to run you home, baby?"

Iris glanced at Barry. She hadn't hung out like this, just with him and no buffer of her dad or Cisco, since the day she'd found out about Barry's secret identity. Not until last night, when she'd helped Barry cook her dad's noodle thing and they'd talked like they used to, for a little while.

She'd missed it.

"No," she said. "I think I'll stick around a little while."

Her father's mouth curved up. "Okay," he said. "You gonna sleep here?"

"No, I'll go back."

"You can crash in your old room if you want. Chocolate chip pancakes in the morning."

"You trying to bribe me?"

"To get more time with my baby girl? Hell yeah."

She giggled. "Rain check, Daddy, I've got to be in early." She kissed his cheek again. "Have fun bowling!"

"Yeah, have a nice time," Barry said, straight-faced.

"Yeah, and you kids can go back to talking about this outlaw metahuman I'm pretending not to know about."

Iris widened her eyes. "Who? What? I have no idea what you're talking about."

He rolled his eyes. "Bye."

As the door closed behind him, they looked at each other. "He still calls it 'bowling'?" Iris said.

"Yep. Like we're still twelve."

Iris rolled her eyes. "I don't know about you, but even when I was twelve I knew that nobody wore cologne to go bowling."

"I know, jeez."

She smirked at him. She'd had to explain it, in very small words, when they'd been fifteen. "So has he let slip who it is? Since you're his roomie and all."

"Nope."

"My money's still on Cecile."

Barry made a horrified face. "Please? Please, for me, who has to testify in court and look at her and think about that? Don't."

"Look, if you've got a better option, is all I'm saying."

"Anyway!" Barry said loudly. "Cisco and Caitlin!"

She dropped back down onto the couch, hard enough to make him bounce. "Okay, fine. Yeah. You're not upset that they're rekindling their friendship, are you?"

"God. No. Of course not. Cisco's awesome, and Caitlin's - she's - "

"Awesome too, in her own way," Iris said firmly. "And lonely."

"Yeah," Barry said quietly. "Very, very alone. Plus I'm glad they've dropped the knives. It'll make things easier. Even just today, I could see how they were working together better. Cisco had some kind of breakthrough to do with the power source and then it was all talking over each other and missing verbs."

Iris shifted, tucking her legs up under her on the couch. "What is she going to do after she gets the implant?"

Barry's face scrunched up. "I don't know. I don't know if she knows."

"Do you think she's going to use her powers?"

"For what?"

"I don't know. The way you do."

"I think she wants to forget she even has them. I don't even know if she would call them powers. More like a curse."

"She has to have been given those powers for a reason," Iris said positively. "Everything happens for a reason."

"In my case, that reason was Eobard Thawne."

Iris could see the moment when his brain went, _awwww shiiiiiit_.

She said sharply, "Don't do that."

"I wasn't - "

"Don't - I'm not fragile. I can hear his _last name,_ Barry, God."

He gave her his saddest look.

"He chose. He made that choice. It's not your fault, you had nothing to do with it."

"I never wanted it to touch you."

"But it did. Right from the beginning, it did. Just because it's you, it did. Why don't you and my dad get that?"

"It's not that we don't get that. But it's dangerous, and we care about you."

"What? I don't care about you?"

"I - didn't - "

"Then what you do isn't dangerous? And I shouldn't worry about you?"

"You're twisting my words."

"It's kind of my job."

"I just want you to be safe. Why don't you understand that?"

"I do, that's the point. But understand doesn't mean agree. I'm never going to be safe enough for you. Even if I never walk into Star Labs ever again, I still live in Central City and my job is right out in the open, and - " She swallowed. "And I think we both know that anybody can be touched by this."

"I brought Eddie in," Barry said, voice trembling.

"And I'm telling you again, he chose." She blinked hard, eyes burning. "For me. For you, for Central City. He chose. You kept me in the dark and you took so many choices away from me."

"Choices like that - "

"Any choice," she snarled, and throttled herself back. She stared him down. "Bare. Barry. I am here for you. I'm always here for you. But I can't be a place you go to hide. You know me better than that. I have to be out there and it's up to you whether I'm out there with you or on my own."

His face turned to stone. "Is this the part where you stomp out?"

"We've done too much walking out on each other lately, so no, I'm not going to. But I'm also not talking about this again. Either you let me into this huge part of your life or you don't."

"And then what?"

"Then what?"

"Say I don't."

She looked at him sadly. "Then, you don't."


	16. Chapter 16

It was strange, having the door unlocked and her cell permanently parked at the entrance to the pipeline. The first night, once her sensors had dipped below four, Caitlin hovered back and forth between her warm cell and just outside. She stood in the place she'd stood the night of the explosion, remembering Ronnie's voice over the walkie-talkie, remembering the warmth of Cisco's hands around hers and the agony reflecting in his eyes.

Strangely, it didn't cut as sharply as it had, once.

She curled up in her bed, feeling the sadness settle into her. Not leaving or dissipating, but not slicing her open either.

The second night, she stayed in her cell until the sensors were below three, and then she made herself a mug of tea and took it with her and walked the halls of Star Labs.

She hadn't done this much, either. Definitely not on her own.

They'd all put in their fair share of ridiculous hours, especially toward the end, so it wasn't the first time she'd seen Star Labs by night. But it was the first time she'd ever seen it so empty - the halls dark, the doors closed. There'd always been someone around. Ronnie, hanging out waiting for her, or doing work of his own. Cisco, immersed in some project, the light of his welder reflecting in the glass of his goggles. The janitorial staff. Members of other departments.

Wells.

Wells had always been around.

She had to set the tea down on the floor before she broke another mug.

She put her hands on the walls and smoothed them over the plaster. This building - it had been built to be destroyed. He'd created it knowing what would become of it, and of many of the people in it. But it still stood. That meant something. She wasn't sure what, yet, but she couldn't shake the feeling that it meant something.

She leaned down to pick her mug up again. The tea inside was cold, a little film of ice crackling over the surface. She took it to the break room and put it in the microwave to warm up again.

When the machine dinged, she took it and started walking aimlessly, still thinking about the building. After awhile, she looked up and realized where she was.

Third floor, west wing, fourth door on the right.

Her office.

She put out a hand and turned the knob.

The lab space had been commonly shared around the whole department, but this office had been her little square of space. She'd shared it with another geneticist, a woman named Anne Blankenship. They'd been cordial but not friendly. The closest they'd ever come to really clicking was when they both had to put up with the vague fug of sexism that all women in science had to put up with. Caitlin wondered where she was now, and thought, _Cisco would know._

Both desks were clear now, the computers gone, a thin film of dust on their bare surfaces. Caitlin went to hers, sat down. The chair was still set to her specifications. She rubbed her hand along the desk, remembering hours spent here. She swiveled a little and looked out into the parking lot. She used to know who was here, working late or getting a jump start on the day, by the cars.

It was empty; Cisco was long since gone home. She hoped he was sleeping. Sleeping and not dreaming, for now.

Her foot kicked something. She looked down.

Underneath the desk sat a brown box with a lid. She pulled it out and opened the lid. On the top was a pad of scratch paper. Her own handwriting, some scrawled notation about some idea she didn't even remember anymore.

She dropped the lid and wrapped her arms around herself, trembling. A wave of loss and sorrow broke over her.

She had been a scientist, a bioengineer, a geneticist. And she'd been _good_ at it.

She'd co-authored papers as an undergrad, research incisive enough that she'd had her pick of grad programs. She'd been headhunted in grad school by companies around the world. She'd picked the defense sector because she wanted to design things, build things, that helped save lives. And her work had, she knew that, but she'd also known that there were men who looked at things intended for defense and saw how they could be warped to destroy.

She'd left the military-industrial complex not because she couldn't hack it, as Hartley Rathaway had sneeringly intimated, but because she didn't want to hack it. She didn't want to be the kind of person who could look at lives lost and consider that acceptable.

She'd already been looking when Wells had approached her at a conference where she was speaking and said, _Word is you're looking for a change of scenery._

She'd looked at him coolly. She wasn't sure how he'd known that. Her job search had been the quietest of the quiet. Maybe he'd been fishing. She'd said, _Possibly,_ because this was Harrison Wells, of Star Labs, whose contact information was written down on a scratch pad next to her home computer, then underlined and highlighted.

He'd smiled at her, eyes crinkling up behind his glasses. _Central City is beautiful this time of year. And my bioengineering department has an open desk._

He'd given her his card and walked away, and she'd thought, _He wants to change the world, and he doesn't want to do it by killing people._ She'd called him the next week.

Oh, god. The irony.

Little frost-ferns grew on the window. She focused on them, focused on slowing their growth, then reversing it. Gradually, they disappeared. She still trembled, but it wasn't so bad anymore. It didn't threaten to break her bones.

She bent down and picked the box up. She would go through it, but she wanted to be in the warmth and the security of her cell when she did.

* * *

When Cisco arrived in the morning, he found Caitlin in a little medical lab off the cortex, surrounded by piles of paper. "Hey," he said, tugging the cover off his work table. "What's that? Decided deforestation wasn't happening fast enough?"

"Did you know Star Labs still has active corporate subscriptions to several major technical journals?" She highlighted a passage.

"Yeah, I'm using 'em until they run out. If I can sell a couple of patents, I might be able to afford to re-up a few."

"Including medical journals."

"Uh-huh." He turned on the light and pulled out the breadboard with the latest iteration of the implant. He had a mess of the little white waffle-looking boards for testing wiring, and rarely used them because he preferred the program on his tablet, but that hadn't been doing the trick. He'd taken the implant apart completely and started from zero, hoping the switch from screen to hands would force his brain to work in a different way.

"Including," she said, waving her papers as she strode up to stand on the other side of his work table, "several focused on the brain and sleep."

He looked at her over his magnifying goggles. "I get the feeling that I'm supposed to know what you're talking about, but I don't."

She huffed. "Lucid dreaming."

He paused, then carefully set the goggles down. "Yeah, I think the problem is that my dreams are a little too lucid."

"But you can't control them, can you? You can't pick and choose which timelines to go into, right?"

He eyed her, unsure whether to be annoyed or not. "I kind of see things from within my own body, but it's like there's another Cisco who's driving. Making all the choices."

"Which is reasonable. It's his timeline."

"So what is it you think I should do?" He waved a hand at her papers. "I mean, I doubt any of those journals have papers about alternate timelines, unless they also have articles about aliens and tips on the best tinfoil for hats."

"No, of course not, but if I'm understanding this correctly, lucid dreaming is about recognizing you're in a dream and controlling your actions. If your path to the alternate timelines is through dreams, I just think that if you could control which timeline you were to go into, then you could get to the point where this skill could be useful."

"How do you even know it's useful?"

"What was it you always said? You can make anything useful, you're an engineer." She gathered together several articles. "Read these."

"Awww, homework? Seriously?"

She swatted him, and he laughed, but didn't take the articles.

She put her hands on her hips. "This isn't like you. Time was, you'd've been delighted to have a power like this. You'd be playing with it like a new socket wrench set. You'd have a notebook full of notes. You'd be sorting out timelines and messing with your dream states and testing your brain waves."

"Times change, Caitlin, and I've seen enough of these turn nasty by now that I'd rather not just start playing."

"As someone who clearly did have it turn nasty, that's going to happen whether you're ignoring it or not. Maybe more possible if you're ignoring it."

"That's blackmail."

"Whatever it takes." She considered him. "Cisco, is this because of what he said?"

"A little."

"Or because he was the one who said it?"

"Yeah. That more, maybe. And why are you suddenly so all about my powers? Whatever they are."

"Do you know how lucky you are? To have something that's not dangerous?"

"You think so? Seeing things that might be, that could be, that never were? You think that's not dangerous? Even just to me?"

Her mouth opened, then closed. She bit her lip. "At risk of sounding preachy . . . the cold is in me for good. It's part of me. It'll never not be there. But I'm - _we're_ going to get it under control. I let the cold happen to me for too long. I don't want to see you do the same thing."

He ran his tongue around his teeth and leaned over his breadboard again.

He thought she was going to swat him again, but she just shook her head and started sorting through the articles. "How's that going?" she asked, nodding at the tiny electronics spread out over his work table.

"I think I'm on to something. If this goes right, it'll be ready for testing this afternoon." He opened his tablet and shoved it her way. "Have a look."

She studied it owlishly. "It's bigger than the original design."

"Yeah, but not uncomfortably so, I'm hoping. I added some functionalities."

She gave him a sardonic look. "Do I get wifi?"

"No, but now that you mention it."

"Oh, we are _not_ calling it the Hotspot."

The proximity alarm went off, and like they'd practiced it, they both grabbed all the print-outs on lucid dreaming before Barry's arrival could turn the cortex into a blizzard of paper.

"C'mon!" he wheedled. "Why not?"

"Because I'm not a Starbucks, that's why!"

He laughed, and Barry said, "What's so funny?" and Caitlin said, "Him and his names," and then Barry laughed a little, and Cisco thought he'd seen this once, the three of them hanging out together in the lab, bickering and laughing and just being around each other, and for a moment timelines slipped and slid in his brain and he closed his eyes, ever so faintly dizzy.

When he opened his eyes, they were both looking at him.

"Cisco?" Barry asked.

"I'm fine," he said, and shoved his fistful of articles into his desk drawer. He caught Caitlin's self-satisfied eye and narrowed his own at her briefly. Okay, just because he'd put them in his desk did not in any way mean he was going to read them.

Not today.

Not this afternoon, anyway.

* * *

He finished it by mid-afternoon, and she changed into one of the hospital gowns as he set up the tablet to receive the test data. He narrated the time and date into the mike. "Test number - " He checked. "Shit. Wow. Okay. Tester number 37. Core temperature is - "

Caitlin checked her tablet and told him,"Twenty-four point two six," and he repeated it into the mike.

He pulled his heavy gloves on and picked up the tester, which was bigger and heavier, and had a longer needle. "Sorry."

"It's okay. We'll put more surgical tape on it if we need it." She jumped a little when the needle pierced her skin, and at her wrists, the seventh light blinked on briefly, then off. She watched them as he smoothed surgical tape over the tester, his hands warm even through the heavy gloves. Two and three and four strips, just to be sure.

She frowned when the sixth light didn't go off. She could feel heat trickling down her spine, but it was just a trickle, not the usual wave. "It's awfully slow."

"We knew it would be," Cisco said. He sat at the end of the bed, as close as he could safely get with six lights at her wrist. "Those staggered set points."

"Right, yes, I know."

His theory was that the previous testers had been pouring out too much heat, all at once. He'd based it too heavily on the heat gun, which fired a single blast of superheated energy. While her body had been drinking it in, the sheer output had still proved too much for the mechanics eventually, leading to overload.

Instead of one set point, they'd selected a range of them. Every ten degrees. Ideally, the implant would slowly and carefully push out just enough power to reach the nearest set point, recalibrate, and then move on to the next up.

"So what do we do while we wait?"

"Well, I have giant robots."

She arched her brow.

"In movie form," he assured her, holding up a DVD case.

"I thought that movie was about giant monsters."

"Excuse me," he said, affronted. "Giant robots punching giant monsters."

"Ooo, well, forgive my ignorance," she said. "Giant robots punching giant monsters."

"Forgiven." He waved a hand airily. "Oh! And popcorn."

"Okay," she said. "Mayhem and popcorn."

They watched giant monsters punching giant robots and ate popcorn, and the lights at Caitlin's wrist slowly blinked into darkness.

By the time the movie ended, the sky through the skylight was pink and orange, with blue creeping in along the edge. She didn't need to look at her wrist to know her temperature was hovering close to normal. Close to human.

Cisco checked the tablet and then looked up, his eyes alight.

"Let's see how long it lasts," she said.

"Yeah, right, I know." But a little smile kept creeping over his face as he looked at her.

She took the popcorn bowls to the break room and washed them out, drying them slowly and carefully, watching the way the water didn't cloud up and chill on contact with her skin. She thought, _Did we do it?_

Her fingers trembled a little. She set the bowls in the drying rack, where they would stay until either she got fed up and put them away herself, or Cisco wanted popcorn again. He'd left the popcorn bag on the counter and she threw that away too.

Footsteps sounded, and she turned.

He walked up next to her, as close as he would get to anybody, any normal person. "How are you doing?"

She shook her head, swallowed.

He nodded. "Kinda weird?"

She nodded jerkily. "Will you hug me?"

Without hesitation, he put his arms around her. She stood unmoving in his embrace, arms stiff at her sides, shoulders knotted up. Waiting for the cold to awaken in her stomach, for it to yawn and stretch and reach out to devour him.

His hand smoothed her hair. "It's okay," he murmured. "It's okay."

She allowed herself to lean into him. This wasn't her cell, and it wasn't dangerously hot. But she was wearing the implant, and right now, it was working. Her cold was no danger to him, and no savior either. It was just . . . nothing, right now, and he was holding her for no reason than that she'd asked him.

She curled her fingers into his shirt.

"Shhhhh," he crooned. "S'okay."


	17. Chapter 17

She didn't sleep in her cell that night. They both wanted to see how it did overnight. Cisco showed her a futon in an office on the ground floor - the head of some department, she thought. He offered to stay, but she made him go home. "And _sleep_ ," she said, watching covertly to see if he took any of the articles she'd printed out.

If he did, he was very sneaky about it.

When she climbed into bed and burrowed under the covers, she found that the pillow smelled like Cisco. This must be where he slept, when he slept here. Which was probably pretty often. Especially lately, when he stayed until he was weaving with exhaustion and snatched a couple of hours of sleep so deep it was like a coma.

That was _not healthy_ , she thought, and wondered if he'd read the articles yet.

Piled high on the end of her bed, there was a stack of what seemed like every blanket Cisco could find in all of Star Labs, in case she needed them in the night. Two space blankets, one thick flannel, one fuzzy cozy throw that Cisco assured her held in heat like an oven. A quilt, a superlatively ugly crocheted thing from the break room couch, a woven blanket with the fringe coming off.

And of course, she could always go back to her cell if it got too bad.

Caitlin woke in the morning and realized that it hadn't. She hadn't even needed any more blankets. She'd burrowed her feet under them, but she hadn't needed any more than that.

She reached back and traced the edge of the surgical tape, feeling strangely bereft. No reason she should. She was warm. She wasn't dangerous. That was what she'd wanted.

She missed her heat sense.

She put her palm out of the blanket and tried to make an ice dagger. It felt like she was hauling a barge, when they'd come so easily. She remembered thinking them through, structure and tension and the way they needed to take up space, struggling for days until successfully making one.

The first time someone had tried to mug her and she'd pulled it out of thin air, he'd thought it was a regular knife. That had been enough to make him run anyway.

She pulled her hand back in and snuggled back under the blankets, thinking how stupid it was, to miss being dangerous.

To miss being powerful.

When Cisco arrived, he said, "Hey. Good morning. How was it?"

"Fine." She fussed with the contents of the cabinets in the med lab, rearranging some of the equipment for no reason than that she could.

He checked the graphs, even though she was pretty sure he'd had his eye on them all night on his phone. "Nice. Hmm." He traced the line. "There's a funny kind of spike on your right sensor, about seven - "

"I was trying something."

He lifted his head. "What?"

"Something that didn't work." She shut the cabinets and swiped her hands together briskly. "So, it's been operational for about seventeen hours, without any signs of overloading."

"Yeahhhhh," he said, and held his hand up.

"These are optimal conditions," she said sternly. "We need to test sub-optimal conditions. I have several ideas."

"Well, so do I. We're gonna test the holy shit of it. But come on, seventeen hours, Caitlin! That deserves a high five, don't you think? You gonna leave me hanging, here?"

She gave him a filthy look and said, "What kind of tests did you think up?"

"Oohhhhh-kay," he said, and dropped his hand.

They started slow and worked their way through a few different things that would alter her body temperature. A chilly room, putting her hands in icy water, a wind tunnel that they created in one of the unused labs.

While she frowned over the mass of tangles that the wind tunnel had sent her hair into, he proposed slushies. "C'mon," he said. "It dominated the wind tunnel. I wanna see how it handles brain freeze."

She worked her fingers through a knot, wincing at the sharp tug on her scalp. Oh well. She could call it another test, a mild one, given how pain set off flares. "Are you sure that's not an excuse to go get slushies?"

"Slushies need no excuse," he said grandly. "Slushies are their own reason."

By the time she'd gotten all the tangles out - _why_ hadn't she thought to braid her hair or something, _ugh_ \- he was back with fruit punch, her old preferred flavor.

They used to get slushies together on Friday afternoon - a tradition that occasionally included a third, or a fourth, or a herd, but no matter what, it was always them. Six months after the explosion, she'd walked into a 7-11 and very nearly went right for the slushie machine, even though her fingers ached with cold. She'd remembered that she couldn't have them and had gotten a cup of boiling hot coffee instead. She hadn't cried but she'd thought she might. That was when they still regularly froze on her cheeks - hard to explain, and somewhat painful too.

He poked her with the end of his straw. "C'mon. Holding it in your hand is having an effect but you need to actually ingest the icy cold deliciousness for this test to work."

She swirled her straw in the melting ice, scooped some up in the end, and nibbled it. The cold on her lips and her tongue made her catch her breath. She hadn't had anything cold in so long.

He tilted the tablet up, nodded to himself.

They went up the roof to finish them. Caitlin found a patch of roof where the sun hit, and she sat there like a cat, soaking it up. She shaded her eyes to peer up at the solar panels. "Are there more of these?"

"Yep. I haven't been up here since we installed these," he said thoughtfully, studying the wiring for a moment before settling himself next to her.

"Not once? Not even with Barry?"

"Not to just sit like this." The wind flicked his hair over his face, and he pushed it behind his ears. "I couldn't."

She sucked at her slushie to hide her smile.

Looking out over the parking lot, she asked him something that she'd been wondering about. "Who were the other metahumans? I followed Iris's blog but I didn't recognize any of the names."

He shrugged. "People who were in the wrong place at the wrong time, mostly. Lightning like Barry, a lot of them, or the shock wave. Two dudes who flew into the storm. Nobody from Star Labs, yet."

"Except us."

"We were the closest to ground zero, that survived."

"Why do we have different powers? And why did mine manifest right away and yours stayed latent for over a year?"

"Why did we have weather controllers and electricity drinkers and shapeshifters, all from the same night and the same event?" He stirred his slushie. "Who the hell knows. DNA probably."

"Do you think there are more out there?"

"I think it's a pretty safe bet."

She set her slushie cup aside and wrapped her arms around her knees. "Crazy, evil, or dead," she said quietly.

"Yeah," he said, just as quietly. "Or a fourth option."

"Do you think it could be different? For them?"

"Maybe? I mean. I feel like we should be able to help them, you know, because it's kind of - "

" _Not_ your fault," she warned. They both knew whose fault it was.

"Yeah, I know. But. We've got all this stuff, all this knowledge of other metahumans and how they worked. Who better, right?"

"Who better," she echoed. "Do you think it could be different for me?"

"Yeah," he said. "Of course, yeah."

She considered him. "Did you read the articles yet?"

His eyes flickered, and he looked away, across the city. "You done with your slushie? Cuz I've got more tests."

"Of course you do," she said.

He stacked their cups together and reached down to help her up. His hand was firm and warm in hers. When she was on her feet, she held onto it.

He gave her a quick, puzzled smile. "What?"

"All those times we came up here, just us," she said.

"Yeah?"

"Did you ever think about kissing me?"

He dropped her hand. She let it go.

"Well?" she persisted.

"Is this it? Are we talking about it?"

"I just want to know."

He wrapped his hands around the slushie cups, his fingertips drumming against the plastic. "Okay. Yeah. Sure. I thought about it. Sometimes."

The wind caught his hair, sending it dancing. God. She liked his hair. She always had. That shiny crow black and the particular way he tucked it behind his ears and how the ends curved against his neck and jaw, or his shoulders, when it got very long.

She put her hands up and brushed it out of his face, tucking it behind his ears, smoothing her hands over his shoulders. He was still as stone, his eyes pitch-black.

"I did, too," she said. "Sometimes. Just . . . wondering."

His lips parted in surprise. She started to lean in.

"Caitlin," he said, and she stopped. "Caitlin, you sure about this?"

She shook her head. "I'm not sure about anything. That's why I want to kiss you, so I can figure at least one thing out."

He nodded a little, to himself maybe. "Okay," he breathed. "Fair enough."

His mouth tasted like slushie, but warm. Their lips brushed shyly, lightly. He pulled away, and she started to step back, ducking her head. But he just set the slushie cups on the ground by their feet and pressed his lips to hers again.

His hands skittered over her shoulders for a moment before settling on her waist. She stepped in again, combing her fingers through his hair as they kissed, slow, deep, curious. No tongue, just lips, moving against each other, sighing into each other's mouth. She recorded it all, intensely aware of the moment. His thumb stroking her ribs, the sound of pleasure he made when she sucked his lower lip, the light scratch of his five o'clock shadow - _ha_ , he'd always said, _more like three o'clock shadow on me_ \- the silk of his hair in her fingers, the shift of his shoulder though his hoodie, where her other hand curled around it.

Eventually they pulled apart.

There was hope and a smile in his eyes. "Well?"

She smiled back. "Still not sure of much, but I know I want to do that again."

"Yeah, me too." He looked around. "Although maybe not up here? Because honest to god, this wind's gonna freeze something important off."

She looked around. "I didn't notice." Oh. She really hadn't noticed. That was amazing.

He opened the door. "We don't all have rockin' implants keeping us warm."

She gave him a look over her shoulder. "I'll just have to share."

* * *

Iris and Barry sat at either end of the workstation. There was something strange between them today; had been ever since Iris had walked in at one o'clock as requested by text from Cisco. Caitlin hoped they hadn't decided to completely stop talking to each other.

"So, I'm sure you're wondering why I called you here today," Cisco said.

Caitlin shifted in her chair, rolling her eyes a little. She would have been fine with just telling them, but Cisco liked to make a big deal out of things.

"I'm hoping it's because we found a million dollars in the walls," Barry said. "Did we?"

"Sadly, no, but this is almost as good. Drumroll, please!" Cisco said.

Barry bada-bada'd his hands against the workstation.

"You call that a drumroll?"

He ramped up the speed until his hands were a blur and the computer monitors swayed slightly.

"Now you're just showing off," Cisco complained, and spread out his arms. "I present to you: Caitlin Snow!"

She smiled awkwardly. They both blinked at her.

"Um," Iris said.

"Caitlin," Cisco said. "Show them."

She held out her wrists, all the sensor lights gone dark. They'd stayed dark for a day and a half now, only the first light flickering every once in a great while.

Iris got it first, gasping. "It worked! Your implant! It's working! Oh, my god!" She jumped up, arms open, and hesitated.

"It's okay," Caitlin said. "It's safe. You can if you want."

Iris grinned and threw her arms around Caitlin. Her arms were warm and nicely squeezy (not too much) and she smelled like key lime pie. Hesitantly, Caitlin hugged her back.

When she let go, Barry claimed a hug too, his long arms wrapping around her and his chin pressing to the top of her head. He was about three degrees warmer than Iris and smelled like plain soap. "That's awesome," he said, letting her go. "That's so, so cool. So is it, like, final? For sure?"

"I'm building the final," Cisco said. "And Caitlin finally agreed to a transdermal instead of subdermal."

"It'll be a lot like the testers, a small portion under my skin but most of it outside." She shrugged. "It will make it easier to swap out for repairs."

"Not to mention tweaks," Cisco said happily.

"So, how are you going to do it?" Iris wanted to know.

"I've got this high school friend who's a piercer and tattoo artist now. I think I can get her to come in and put in an anchor for us. It'll have a sort of bolt that I can screw the device into."

"Pain still causes flares," Caitlin pointed out, worrying her bottom lip with her teeth. "And she's going to be implanting a fairly sizeable piece of hardware under my skin. We need to figure out some way to do it that's as safe as possible for your friend."

"We'll work it out," he said. "Maybe in your old cell?"

"I - "

An alarm blared, and everyone jumped. Cisco reacted first. "That's an all-cars alert," he said, rushing to his monitor. "Wow. Looks like armed robbery."

In two whooshes of wind, Barry was gone and then back, as the Flash. "Where?"

"Across town."

"Okay, I - "

Another alarm blared, and Iris said, "Oh, my god!" She was holding her phone. "An explosion in the basement of an apartment building. Cisco, isn't that where you live?"

"Two over," Cisco said, checking. Whatever he saw on the screen made him go pale and breathe, " _Ay, Dios mio."_

"How many people?" Barry asked.

"About five hundred in that building," Cisco said, looking grey. "A lot of families. This is going to be complicated. If it was in the basement, it'll have impacted the structure - "

"Okay," Barry said. "Uh. I'll go to the fire first - the robbery will just - " He looked green. "- will just have to - "

"No," Caitlin said, and her voice sounded very far away.

"Caitlin?"

"No. I'll go. To the fire."

"But we don't know how the implant does with heat," Cisco said. "We haven't been testing that."

"I won't wear it." She reached up, feeling like she was moving through a dream, and peeled back the surgical tape. The pain of the needle pulling from her skin shot threads of ice down her spine. She saw, out of the corner of her eye, the first sensor light blink. "Barry, you get those robbers. Cisco, I need your keys."

"Too slow," Barry said. "I'll take you."

"But - "

"I have faith in the suit," Barry said. "It's insulated against heat and friction. It'll protect me against your cold, especially since you're only at one light."

The wind would sharpen her hunger. Too much? Caitlin pressed her lips together and nodded, hoping she wasn't signing a lot of people's death warrant via Killer Frost.

Cisco swallowed, staring at the implant she'd set on the work station, at the smear of her blood on the needle. He looked up and her, then bolted across the room to his work table. Then he came back. "Okay. Put this in." He handed her an earpiece, identical to the one that had been blown out the night they'd rescued Barry from the warehouse. "I'll pull up blueprints - I'll be right in your ear."

"What about Barry?" Iris asked in a high-pitched voice. "He's got to handle those armed robbers - "

"I can handle two scenes."

"No," Barry said. "You said it'd be complicated. You need to focus on the apartment building. Iris? You know all the police codes. You memorized them before I did. Can you - please?"

Iris blinked a few times, then smiled. "Yeah," she said. "You know I'm here for you."

"I know."

Caitlin put the earpiece in. "Is it live?" she asked Cisco.

He checked his tablet. "Yep." He took an unsteady breath. "Caitlin, I - " He swallowed. "Come back to me. Okay? Just come back to me."

There were too many words; they stopped up her throat, crowded her tongue to stillness. She touched his cheek, then kissed him swiftly, too aware of the cold waking in her. They were losing valuable time.

She stepped back and said to Barry, "Let's go."

Without argument, he picked her up. She clutched his shoulders as Star Labs dissolved around her. The wind whipped bitterly around her, and her heat sense sharpened like a serpent's tooth.

Barry set her down - almost dropped her - in the middle of a hallway with fire crawling up the walls and dripping from the ceiling. He staggered back a few steps.

"Are you all right?"

"Yeah, the cold just started to grab me for a moment there." He shook his head, so fast he momentarily blurred. "I'm fine." He looked around. "You're gonna be okay? Because I can - "

"I'll be fine," she said, stepping back from him. "Go!"

He went, and the fire whooshed and flailed in the sudden vacuum. She stood for a moment, breathing in the superheated air, using her newly-sharpened heat sense to map the blaze. An ember landed on her cardigan, but her body, greedy without the implant, sucked up all the heat before it could burn a new hole in the wool.

"Cisco?" she said quietly.

"I'm here," he said in her ear. "You're on the first floor. Fire department's just pulling up. How are you doing?"

She pressed her hand to her stomach, where the cold uncoiled, awakened by the feast. "I'm okay."

"The worst of it is - "

Below her feet, whooshing up the elevator shaft, climbing the stairs. "I know where it is," she murmured.

"Miss!" someone shouted. "Miss! You need to get down on the ground and move toward me, miss!"

She turned her head and saw the firefighters at the end of the hall, in their suits like alien spacemen. "No," she called. "No, there are people up there." She pointed. "And you?" She crooked her finger. "Need to come to me."

"Miss, you need to get down on the ground and - "

She put up her hand, sweeping it from floor to ceiling, and the fire flinched, flickered, shrank.

 _Mmmmmmm._

They stared at her, flames flickering in the glass of their helmets.

"I can kill this fire, but unless those people are out of here, it might kill them too, so _come on_."


	18. Chapter 18

Cisco had the blueprints up, and he had the firefighters' radio feed patched in, his speech-to-text transcriptor rolling their chatter up the screen. So far, so familiar. But still, when the first voice said, "Jesus, this woman's just standing there," he let out a yelp, and when he heard her voice, speaking to them - _You need to come to me_ \- he pressed his hands to his face and hyperventilated for a few seconds.

He swallowed, because she was in the middle of a fire and this was no time to geek out however wickedly cool that had been, and said into his mike, "Caitlin, the fire stairs are off to the left. Can you clear a path?"

"On it," she said.

He chewed his thumbnail. What if she overestimated her ability to take in heat? She'd only been at one light when they left, and even when Barry had dropped her at the scene, his tablet had shown five. What if she died of smoke inhalation?

A firefighter's voice blasted out of the speakers. "It's just - fuck, they're backing off, they're just being sucked away or some shit, do you see this? I swear I'm not hallucinating, sir, I swear - "

 _Oh my god this is so cool and amazing and awesome and - and sweet Nikola Tesla, don't let her die._

Off to his left, Iris said, "Barry, they're bringing in backup, make sure - "

He scowled to himself. He hadn't counted on how much of a distraction two people running two different scenes would be. If only he had a pair of noise-canceling headphones or something. Maybe he'd need to look into that.

Caitlin cleared the fire stairs, killed a few spot fires that had tried to sneak upwards, and let the firefighters go by her, calling out apartments where she sensed people.

When she broke off in a coughing fit, he broke out in a cold sweat. Any fourth-grader knew that the real danger in a fire situation wasn't the fire itself, but the smoke and the lack of oxygen. "You okay? Hey! Caitlin?"

When she spoke, her voice crackled. "It's okay, Cisco, I just got a mouthful. But I figured out a way to chill air and create currents to pull it away from myself."

"Okay, that's super fucking cool, but do you have something you can put over your mouth?"

"Oh! Yes."

Voices rose in Cisco's ears, a babble of terrified people as firefighters helped people out and then ran back in.

One firefighter's voice came over the radio and echoed in Caitlin's earpiece. "I don't know how you're doing any of this, but please god, keep doing it, and put this on."

Rustles and clicks and then Caitlin's breathing took on an odd Darth Vadery quality as she asked, "Where else do you need clear?"

"There's another set of fire stairs on the north side of the building, but half the doors are blocked by fire."

"I'll take care of it."

"Be careful."

"What'd she give you?" Cisco asked.

"A breathing rig," she said, her voice joggling as if she were running. "And a helmet. Oh," she sighed. "Oh, Cisco. You should see this fire."

She sounded like she was looking at a chocolate cake, and it was - no pun intended - incredibly hot.

Out of the corner of his eye, he saw Iris drop into her chair, as if her bones wouldn't hold her up anymore. Having had that reaction when the Flash did his thing, he figured Barry must be done.

Caitlin cleared the second set of fire stairs and asked him, "Are they all out? The firefighters. The people. I've taken in so much my heat sense is basically gone."

He checked. "Give it a few, they're helping a couple people out yet, it sounds like."

Someone tapped him on the shoulder. Cisco lifted his head to see Iris at his elbow, her eyes wide. He realized that there was something thick in the air, like an invisible blanket, and he hadn't heard anything from that half of the work station in quite awhile.

All of a sudden, his ears popped, and Iris shouted, "Cisco!"

"I hear you!" he said, rearing back. "Geez."

"Well, you didn't respond," she said. "Barry's done at his scene."

"Bare?" he called in the direction of the mike. "Go back, Caitlin's still working on hers."

 _Whoosh_ , over the speakers, and then Barry let out a yelp of a laugh. "Holy shit. Holy shit. Are you guys seeing this?"

He clicked over to the video feed from Barry's suit, and saw the inside of the apartment building, smoke billowing, flames leaping as the firefighters pulled the inhabitants out. In the middle of the hallway, Caitlin stood, hands outspread, keeping a corridor of clear air for them like a bitter-cold Moses parting a fiery Red Sea. Her hair danced and her cardigan flapped in the swirling air currents, and her eyes glowed blue, the only cold in all that hot space.

Cisco punched the air, screaming soundlessly.

She turned. "Everybody's out. Flash? Leave."

"But - "

"Leave. Keep the area clear. I will take care of this."

Barry whooshed out, and Cisco said into his mikes, "Caitlin, the whole thing? The whole fire?"

"I think I can do it."

His hands clutched around the back of his usual chair. He'd seen what she could do. He squeezed his eyes tight. "Be careful," he said.

Iris touched his shoulder, and he blinked his eyes open again. On the screen, Barry's video feed showed the chaos outside the apartment building. The last firefighter delivered a small boy to the EMTs and tried to run back in.

"There's nobody else!" one of the other firefighters called out.

"Yes there is!" she called back. From her voice, it was the same one who'd given Caitlin the gas mask, and Cisco decided she was his favorite firefighter in the history of ever.

"Eldon, you stay here!"

The firefighter dragged off her helmet, her dark hair sticking to her face. "Look, that woman, she's still in there, she - "

Barry caught her arm. "Trust me. Don't."

Her mouth shaped the word, _Flash._ She blinked once or twice. "You getting her?"

"No. She doesn't need me to."

"She a friend of yours?"

"Yeah."

The fighter looked dazed. Sweat and smoke-tears cut tracks down her face. She turned to look at the fire and whispered, "Would you look at that."

The flames were shrinking, retreating, thinning out. It was like watching video of a fire played backward.

The firefighter let out a noise like a cough or a sob or a gulp of air. "That's the kind of fire where we lose people. Civilians and good men and Mother of God, _it's just going away_."

Cisco risked a glance at Caitlin's vitals, ticking away on his tablet. Her core temperature rose and rose and rose, until he thought she must be on fire herself, but her heart beat strong and steady and her respiration was good, thanks to the gear.

But her core temperature kept going up.

"Caitlin?" he asked, voice trembling.

"I'm good, it's good," she breathed. "I can get all of it. I can."

Cisco checked the video feed again and saw steam hissing and billowing where the hoses spat water onto the dying fire. Not steam. _Mist._ And frost crept up the sides of the building, crawling higher, encasing the gutted building.

His heart leapt into his throat just as Iris shouted, "Barry! They need the water off, they need it off _right now_ or the whole water main might freeze!"

The video blurred briefly and then Barry's hand wrenched the fire hydrant shut. Just in time, too. The arcs of water from the hoses, already losing pressure, froze into glittering blue rainbows that hung in the air for a single breath before collapsing to the street, sending shards of ice in every direction, skating across the frozen pond that surrounded the building three feet out.

A few people screamed, most ducked, and a very small voice shouted, " _Mama I told you so!"_

"Caitlin," Cisco said. "You - you there?"

"Yes," she said dreamily.

"You can stop."

She took a shuddering breath. "I know." And on his tablet, the sensor lights dropped from ten to zero.

He looked back up at the video feed. The only thing left was the smoke, thinning out, drifting away, and the ice, shining as it began to melt under the sun.

Cisco leaned into his mike. "Caitlin. That structure's unsound now, if you're not out in like two seconds - "

"I know," she said again, her voice clearer. More sure. More Caitlin.

She was walking down the steps, looking small against the backdrop of the ruined building. Inside, something crashed, and she flinched. She fumbled with the breathing rig, peeled the mask off, took the helmet off.

Her eyes were brown.

Eldon stepped forward through the melting and took it, staring at her like she was a miracle.

Barry stepped toward her. "Heyyyyyy, C - "

Cisco made a protest into his mike.

" - Killer," Barry finished. "How, uh, how are you doing?"

She looked over her shoulder at the house, then around. Cisco couldn't see what she saw, because Barry was facing her, but he could imagine it - coughing, dazed people, firefighters, EMTs, staring at her in shock and awe. She looked a little dazed herself. "I - " She pressed her fingers to her cheeks. "I'm warm."

Cisco checked her core temperature again. It ticked downward a degree or two, but at a leisurely pace. Now he was a little worried she'd burn Barry instead of freezing him.

"Well. That's great," Barry said. "Awesome."

"And I want to go back now."

"Okay. We can definitely do that."

The video feed blurred, and Cisco turned it off, because he'd left it on before and it was way too disorienting to see himself on the screen, from Barry's perspective.

Barry appeared and set Caitlin on her feet again. She stumbled and Cisco jolted forward, but she caught herself and straightened up. "That was - " Her eyes found Cisco's, and she smiled enormously. "That was amazing."

"You were amazing," he said, pulling her into a tight hug. She hugged him back, then kissed him. Her lips were hot against his, and her hands burned through his shirts, but he kissed her back, sighing with relief that he could.

"Cisco," she breathed into his mouth. "Cisco, _I'm warm."_

"Yeah. Yeah, you are." He let her go and backed away, feeling the blush creep up his cheeks at the look Barry was giving him.

Iris was hugging Caitlin now, squealing, "Oh, that was amazing, oh my god!" She held her by the shoulders. "You're going to be the biggest story in Central City."

Some of Caitlin's smile faded. "Really?"

"My editor has already texted me twice. Metahumans are news, and heroic metahumans even more so. Trust me, this is what I do. There's no way you won't be." Iris squeezed her shoulders and let go. "But I can be vague about you, if you want me to be. Maybe - 'mysterious metahuman heroine?'" She looked over at Cisco. "Or, did you come up with a good name?"

"Um," Cisco said. He actually hadn't, which was a shock. He started casting around. "Well, I - "

But Caitlin said, "Go ahead and say Killer Frost. Barry said part of it anyway, at the scene."

"Caitlin," Cisco said, feeling his stomach squirm with guilt. "That name - "

"I'm still the same person, with the same powers. Just because I can control them now doesn't mean anything else has changed."

Iris nodded a few times. "Plus, that means I can talk about the possibility of transformation. How many metahumans are out there, convinced that they can never be anything but destructive?"

"Exactly."

The two women smiled at each other.

"Bare, can you drop me off at the scene?" Iris asked. "I want to get there before everybody else."

"Sure," Barry said, giving Caitlin a quick look. "Good job," he said in a low voice, hugging her around the shoulders. "Guys, I'm gonna get called in, I can pretty much tell, so, um, I'll be back later tonight? We can celebrate. All of us," he added, looking at Iris.

"All of us," she said firmly.

He picked her up, and they smiled at each other like the couple from a Disney movie.

"Dude, eyes on the road, not on the girl," Cisco said, and Barry took a moment to flip him off while Iris giggled into his shoulder, before he whooshed away.

"About time," Caitlin said, rolling her eyes.

"I know, right?"

She walked over to pick the implant up. She held it up to the light, then took it to the med lab and started cleaning the dried blood on the needle with alcohol. "Cisco?"

He'd trailed after her, cautious, worried. "Yeah?"

"Do you think - um - you could add something else to the design?"

It was hard to read her face from this angle. "You still want it, then."

"Of course I do."

"You used your powers today," he felt compelled to point out. "And it was amazing. Are you sure you want to block them?"

"It was amazing. But it doesn't cancel out everything else I've done. That's why I need this, and that's why I also need a way to shut it down." She set it down on a stainless-steel tray. "When I choose it. When I need the cold."

He nodded, looking down at the implant. "I can do that," he said. "Yeah. That's something I can do."

"And you need to call your friend. The piercer."

He blinked. "Now?"

She pressed her fingers to her cheeks and smiled wonderingly. "With all the heat I took in? It's the best possible time."

* * *

Barry blurred to a stop in an alley just around the corner from the burnt apartment building. Iris shivered as he set her down.

"You okay?"

"Wind ch-ch-chill," she said, teeth chattering.

He wrapped his arms around her for a minute, all his considerable Barry-warmth soaking into her bones. She rested her forehead against his chest, sighing.

"Thank you," she breathed.

"You're welcome," he said quietly, and she knew he'd understood that it was for more than warming her up. "Good now?"

"Uh-huh."

"Okay, then, I've got to - "

"Wait." Iris grabbed Barry's arm. "Okay, before you zip off, something weird happened. Back there? With Cisco?"

"I know! Did you see that kiss before we left? And then when we got back? That's new. He's totally holding out on me."

She flapped her free hand. "Not that!" Although that was certainly extremely interesting and she planned on interrogating them about it tonight. She leaned in. "Look, okay, when we were both on the mikes, for about the first minute it was really hard to hear you because Cisco was talking at the same time. And then all of a sudden I couldn't hear him anymore. And I looked over and he was still talking, I could see his mouth moving."

"He lowered his voice?"

"I couldn't hear him at all. Or the firefighters' radio feed. From three feet away! It was like something was interfering with the sound."

Barry rubbed a hand over his hair. "Ummmm . . . maybe it was one of his machines he turned on? Like, a white noise machine?"

"Why would he have that around?"

"Why does Cisco build anything? Mostly 'cause he can."

"I guess." She frowned at nothing. "Still. Weird, right?"

"I guess." His phone _bing_ ed, and if it was possible for a phone to sound annoyed, it did. He cringed.

"Go," Iris said, and hugged her coat around herself as the wind of his exit blasted her hair back. "Paperweights," she said to herself. "Lots of paperweights."

She pulled out her phone and opened up the recorder program, then shook herself once and nodded. She strode out into the scene that she'd seen briefly on Barry's video feed and made a beeline for the closest firefighter. It was the one who'd talked to the Flash, as it turned out. Eldon, she remembered, and told herself not to use the name until she was introduced.

"Iris West, Central City Picture News," she said. "Can you tell me what happened here?"


	19. Chapter 19

When he called Luci, her voice went squeaky with surprise. "Cisco?"

He fumbled his way through the small talk - _hey, yeah, long time no see, I know, life, what can you do_ \- and managed to ask her if she could spare some time, ASAP.

"I can be there in twenty minutes.," she said.

His brows rose. Business must be slow. "Okay. Sounds great."

He met her outside the fence, nineteen minutes later.

She peered up at the signs, warning of condemnation, danger, high voltage. "Well," she said blandly. "This is not ominous at all."

"Eh," he said. "Mostly it's to keep out the solicitors. You know. Magazine salesmen, Jehovah's Witnesses. Funny thing is, it doesn't seem to work on the Girl Scouts."

"Oh, well, those little bitches will go anywhere. Plus. when it comes to cookies, you're a sure thing and they know it."

He laughed and hugged her. He'd known Luciana Duran ever since she'd been Gustavo, when they'd dated in high school. "Thanks for coming."

She shrugged, putting her arm around his shoulders as they walked toward the building. "For you, anything. It's been awhile, Cisco."

He looked away under cover of swiping his card at the door. "Yeah, um, it's been a rough year or so."

She didn't seem entirely satisfied by that, but didn't pursue it. "So, you were very mysterious on the phone. What's this emergency piercing and why couldn't we do it at La Mariposa?"

Her little tattoo parlor wasn't more than two miles away, so Cisco could understand her confusion. "Long story. I'm going to let her tell you."

When they walked into the cortex, her mouth fell open. "Holy shit. So this is where you've been hiding out?"

He shoved his hands in his pockets. "I haven't been hiding out."

"Whatever." Luci moved further in. "Hi," she said to Caitlin, sitting on the hospital bed, in one of the hospital gowns. "I'm guessing you're the girl who needs her piercing right now."

"Yes. Caitlin Snow."

"Hi, Caitlin, I'm Luci, and I'll be cutting holes in you today." Luci held out her hand. Caitlin hesitated, and Luci's smile faded. "Well," she said stonily. "I see how it is."

"No," Caitlin said. "I'm sorry. You don't. I'm not going to take your hand unless you understand what it is you're doing. I have a condition that can make it dangerous for others to touch me."

Luci's stony expression softened, but only slightly. "Uh, well, I kind of need to touch you for this procedure. Dangerous in what way?"

"I have no body heat of my own, so I have take it from the environment. Other peoples' body heat especially. I should be all right at the moment - I took in a great deal of heat today - but I'm not letting you do this without - "

"Wait. You're - did you - were you on Marrow Street today?"

"I - yes."

"The fire. In the apartment building. People said they saw a woman, and she _drank_ the fire - "

"I - that's not really the most accurate - "

"That was you." Luci dropped her bag and clapped her hands to her face. "Oh, my god."

Cisco took a quick step toward her. "Luce - "

"My boyfriend's mom lived in those apartments," she said through her fingers.

Caitlin ducked her head. "I - um -"

Luci wiped her face, smearing her thick eyeliner. "Anything you need, you got it. I don't care. Just tell me and I'll make it happen. That woman is a saint on earth."

Cisco took over. "What she needs is an anchor for a pretty heavy-duty dermal. Here, I'll show you how it looks - "

While Luci examined the mockup of the implant, he glanced over his shoulder. Caitlin had her face turned away from both of them, blinking hard and biting her trembling lips. He wanted to go and pull her into his arms, but he knew better than that while there was a stranger around. He did the next best thing and took his time about conferring with Luci over the proper size of anchor.

"Hey," he said softly. "Thanks for telling her that. She needed to hear it."

"It was the truth." Luci shook her head. "Julissa told us how it was, in there. How did your girl not know how amazing that was?"

"She's had a rough time," he said. "With these powers. This - " He hefted the mockup. "This is to help her manage them."

"Hey, Cisco? How do you know her?"

"She used to work here."

Luci gave him a very thoughtful look. Before she could ask anything more, he turned and called over his shoulder, "Caitlin? You ready?"

"Mmmhm!" She sounded a little too resolutely chipper. "Yes. Still at zero." She held up her wrists.

"Okay. Luce?"

Luci showed Caitlin every tool she was using and explained how she would use it, and Caitlin followed along with a serious crinkle between her eyebrows. In her turn, she explained the warning signs of a cold flare to Luci, and showed her the full box of chemical hand warmers that Cisco had ready if they were needed. They'd put the tester back on, but Caitlin wasn't taking any chances.

Cisco pulled a chair over, one of the wheely ones, and sat cross-legged so he could balance the box of handwarmers on his knees. "You let me know when you need one," he said.

"Can I hold one now?" She held up a hand. "Not activated. Just to have it, in case."

"Yeah." He pointed out the directions on the packet. She read them through twice, then sandwiched it between her hands and settled them on her knee.

"Good?" Luci asked from behind her.

"Good."

"Okay. We're going to start by cleaning the area."

After all their preparation, the process itself was surprisingly short. When Luci pressed the punch against Caitlin's back, she took in her breath through her nose.

She held it until Luci set the punch down and pressed a wad of gauze against Caitlin's back. "Okay. We're halfway home. You need a break? Gotta warm up? The second part's just as quick but it tends to hurt a little more."

"No," Caitlin said. "You can go on. The tester's working the way it needs to."

"Course it is. Cisco made it. He ever tell you about his senior project?"

"No," Caitlin said.

"Oh, shit, Luce," Cisco said. "Not this."

Luci picked up a set of forceps with the anchor already in them. "Yes, this, it's an awesome story. You wanna hear it while we do this, Caitlin?"

Caitlin cracked the handwarmer. "Yes, please."

Luci smiled at the back of her head. "Okay," she said, "So you have to understand that our counselor was this racist prick. Cisco'd been to him a hundred times asking about scholarships if he'd been once."

Caitlin pressed her lips together, fingers kneading the handwarmer as Luci worked the anchor through the hole the dermal punch had made, settling the flat foot between the layers of her skin, telling the story as she did.

" - and, done. Now we just have to put in the topper and you're home free."

"So." Caitlin cleared her throat. "So what happened to the parrot?"

"It escaped out the cafeteria window," Cisco said, "and is now living free somewhere in Central City."

"Either that, or it ended up in a bucket of Lucky Cluck." Luci finished screwing in the temporary topper, a flat titanium disk, and stripped off her bloodied gloves. "You did great, Caitlin. I wish all my clients were as chill as you."

"No pun intended?"

"Slight pun intended."

They went over aftercare and Luci left her number - "Text me anytime, okay? Any questions, or even if you just want to show it off" - as well as several products for cleaning the area and a little tool that would help with switching out the topper.

When she'd cleaned everything thoroughly and packed up her instruments, she lingered. "Thanks again," she said. "You did an incredible thing."

"Thank you," Caitlin said curtly, ducking her head.

"Listen - can I tell people I met you?"

Caitlin looked up at Cisco, eyes wide. He shrugged, widening his eyes in return. It was her call.

"That's fine," she said softly. "That's all right."

Luci smiled, then sobered. "I - uh - what do you want to be called?"

"Well." Caitlin licked her lips. "Killer Frost. I'm okay with that."

"Okay," Luci said. "But I didn't mean your name."

Caitlin's brows crunched together.

"It's just, I keep seeing different names. Like, hyper-powered, or metahuman, or, or, or superhero - "

She was leaving out a lot of other terms that Cisco had seen. Lightning freaks, power monsters, mutants, demons.

"Metahuman is fine," Caitlin said. "I prefer that. It's the most descriptive."

"Okay," Luci said. "Great. I'll use that. It was so good to meet you. Thanks."

"Thank you," Caitlin said.

Cisco walked out with her. At the gate, Luci lingered, rolling the bills that he'd given her into a tight tube and then letting them unroll. "Hey, Cisco?"

"Yeah?"

"She said she used to work here."

"Yeah."

"I guess that's how - " She waved a hand. "That happened. The metahuman thing. That gnarly explosion did it. Central City didn't get really weird until after that."

"Yeah." His hands, in his pockets, balled into fists.

She opened her mouth, closed it, looked away. "Okay. It was really good seeing you. It's been too long."

He shrugged. "Rough year," he said again.

"Yeah, yeah." But there was hurt in her eyes.

"I'll call you," he offered. "We'll hang out."

"Better," she said. "Come by the Butterfly anytime you want."

"Yeah," he said brightly. "It's so close."

"Yeah," she said.

She let herself out the gate, but turned before he closed it. "Cisco? Are you one too?"

He felt his stomach twist.

"No," she said before he could say anything, shaking her head. "Sorry. I shouldn't've - You don't have to tell me, if you're not comfortable."

"Yes," he said. "I'm a metahuman too."

She put one hand on the frame of the gate. "For real?"

"Yeah."

"You?"

He swallowed. "Yeah."

"Well," she said, and let out her breath. "It's about time we got some more good ones."

He blinked at her.

"Cisco," she said, coming back in the gate. "It's you. You could never be anything but one of the good ones."

He thought he might cry. He looked at the ground, swallowing.

"Dummy," Luci muttered, and hugged him. He hugged her back. Even though the body that pressed against his was different than the one that he'd hugged and kissed in high school, the person inside was the same. Probably that was significant or something.

"What can you do?" she asked, letting him go.

"I don't really know yet. Still figuring it out."

"Holy shit," she giggled. "I made out with a superhero."

"You did way more than that with a superhero."

She laughed outright. "Don't tell Brian. He might be jealous. Hey, you've gotta meet Brian still!"

"Yeah, I do." He shook his head. He could tell just from the way she talked about her boyfriend that Luci was crazy about him. He knew they'd been together almost a year. How had he missed someone so important in his friend's life?

She'd been right. He had been hiding out.

She shook her head at him and turned to go. As he was closing the gate, she turned around to walk backward on the sidewalk and yell back to him, "Hey, superhero! Don't be a stranger."

"No more," he yelled back.

"Promise?"

"Promise!"

* * *

Iris brought champagne - "Not very fancy, I'm afraid, not on a reporter's salary," she said - and Barry brought a giant platter of sushi with a logo on the plastic wrap that made Caitlin's eyes widen.

"Barry, Otaasan is very upscale! Since when did they start doing takeout?"

"Ummmm? They really don't, except for people that kinda sorta saved the owner's mom this one time."

They ate and drank while watching the news report. Caitlin put up with it because the others were so excited to see. All that attention made her want to hide, even though there was a glow around her heart from seeing people she'd helped.

Cisco cringed every time they said "Killer Frost." Caitlin gaped when they interviewed a very small girl with wide brown eyes and a top stiff with glitter under the smoke smudges, who said, "It was Elsa, _Elsa saved us_ ," with a fervor that in an adult might have started a major religion. The reporter nodded seriously at her.

"There are worse Disney princesses to be," Iris said through her laughter.

"Excuse me, but Elsa was a queen," Caitlin said, and set them all off.

"You've seen it?" Cisco gasped.

"I think you misunderstand just how much free time I had on my hands," Caitlin said and reached for some more sushi as the news switched over to a report on the California wildfires.

She'd watched it months ago in her shitty apartment, curling her lip at the schmaltzy Disney-ness of it. The idea that the only thing she needed to fix her was love. But she felt more kindly toward the story now - more compassionate toward the overwhelmed girl who'd hidden from the world.

So she didn't fight too hard when Cisco decided he was going to be a complete shit and cued up _Frozen_ \- the sing-along version, naturally. Iris was about two cups of champagne in and cheered the boys on as they belted out the first song. "Come on, Caitlin! Join in!"

"Nooooooooo!" Cisco said.

"Oh, Cisco!"

"Listen to him, he's done karaoke with me," Caitlin said.

"That way lies pain and sorrow," Cisco said seriously, and filled his cup again.

She took a couple of sips of champagne because Iris had brought it, but no more. She wasn't sure how alcohol affected her powers. Barry had half a cup, and said ruefully, "It doesn't affect me anymore, so it's for mostly the taste, and - " He made a face at his paper cup of champagne where Iris couldn't see.

Between them, Cisco and Iris finished off the bottle and fell asleep before the end of the movie, Iris curled up in a chair and Cisco stretched out on the couch.

"Seriously," Barry said. "I don't know how he does that and avoids the demon ass-chomping spring. I swear it almost castrated me last time."

"You have to know how to sit on it right," Caitlin said.

They went to the cortex and sat at the workstation, companionable, quiet, watching some dumb late-night tv show on the monitors. He had his long legs propped up on the desk, resting just to the left of one of the keyboards.

"My glucose levels plummet," he said out of nowhere. "Sometimes. If I don't pay attention to how much I've eaten."

"How many calories do you need?" With all that running, it must burn off in a blink.

"Enough that I should be the size of an elephant. Depends on how much running I did." He dropped his head back so he stared at the ceiling. "Cisco made me these nutrient bars. If I have a dizzy spell, I can eat one and it's got this combo of, like, quick calories and slow calories or something. It steadies me until I can get something more substantial. Like half a cow."

She nodded, picturing how it would work. "How do they taste?"

"Like pan-fried ass. Don't tell him that. He keeps trying to tweak the formula and I swear he makes it worse every time." He laughed, then sighed. "I can't get drunk anymore and I get dizzy spells and even though I heal quick, it still hurts, and the world is so, so slow sometimes." He rolled his head so he could see her face. "None of that's as bad as what you have to deal with. I know. I'm not trying to be all 'mine is worse than yours' cuz honestly it's _not_."

"I know," she said.

"I mean, the world may have gotten slow but it also got - " He flailed a hand. " _Big_ , you know? I love what I do. I love helping people. I love my powers."

"I can tell."

"Even knowing how I got them, I love them, and sometimes I kind of hate that I love them and . . . " He looked back at the ceiling. "I'm sorry."

"It's not your fault. It's his."

"I miss him," Barry said. "That's awful, right? After all the things he did."

"I miss who I thought he was," Caitlin said. "I miss what I thought we were doing here."

"Yeah," he said distantly. "I just can't reconcile how he acted with what he really was doing here."

"He found me," she said suddenly.

She hadn't even told Cisco this. She wasn't sure how he'd react.

Barry lifted his head. "When?"

"After the explosion. He came as the Reverse Flash. He gave me the medicines that suppressed my ability to suck in heat. He told me how to use them and in what proportions and who manufactured them and who manufactured the generics."

"What about keeping warm?"

"That was the best they could do." She worked her fingers through the loose threads in her cardigan. "He said 'I regret what happened to you.' In that distorted voice of his. I've thought about that a lot. Since I found out, I mean. At that point I was still just trying to stop myself from icing over everything I touched, and I would have taken anything, done anything. Then after they started working, I thought maybe it was the Flash, until I met you."

"Why would he do that at all?"

"I don't know. Wouldn't it have been easier to just let me die? God knows he let a lot of other people die."

"Why did he give you meds, though? Why not some version of the implant? I mean, he was from the future. Wouldn't they've known?"

"Maybe in his future, I didn't have it. Maybe I was always the dangerous supervillain in his future." She croaked, "'Always in motion is the future.'"

Barry cracked up. "Holy shit. I didn't know you could do such a good Yoda."

She giggled. "Ronnie loved Star Wars." Sudden tears chilled her eyes, and she let out her breath.

"I'm sorry you lost him. Cisco told me some things. He sounds great."

"He was."

They were quiet for another few minutes. Barry switched the channel to the news, which was doing an in-depth story on the wildfire season in the West. It was bad, apparently.

"I didn't like you very much," she said when the segment was done. "At the beginning."

"Rrrrreally," Barry drawled. "I never noticed."

She threw him a look that made him laugh.

"Thank you for being there for Cisco," she said softly. "All this time."

"I never knew how lonely he was until you came back," Barry said. "He's always - he covers things up, I think. Really well. So you don't even notice. But ever since you've been back, there's been - I don't know. He's better. Not so brittle, sometimes. Not so much of . . . _don't look at me, everything's fine._ I thought it was you, messing him up, but then I realized he's always been a mess. He's just letting me see it now."

"I can't imagine him being brittle."

"You weren't here."

She sighed.

"Thanks for talking with Iris so much," he said a few minutes later, at a commercial break.

"It was as much for me as for her. But, you're welcome."

"I don't know what to say to her. About Eddie. I feel like I'll just make it worse."

"It's not about you. It's about her. You don't need to say anything. You just need to listen."

He picked at his fingernails, frowning.

"You need to understand," she said. "No matter what you do, or say, or how long you listen, or how long anybody listens . . . this won't fix itself. It can't. There will be a hole in her heart forever, and what she's doing now is learning how to live with it. Now, maybe she'll love - " She glanced at him. "Someone else, eventually. But she will always miss him and it will always hurt, even just a little. She'll think of him on his birthday and on the day he died and when she sees his favorite ice cream flavor or hears a song on the radio that he would have sung off-key. All those things won't mean she doesn't love someone else, but loving someone else doesn't mean those things will go away."

Barry was quiet. "Okay," he said. "I understand."

"Okay."

After the end of the show, Barry climbed to his feet and stretched. "She's got to work tomorrow. I'll run her home." He went into the break room, but paused over Cisco, still asleep on the couch, and now snoring ever so slightly. Barry squatted by the couch and poked at Cisco's cheek, but he just turned his head and slept on.

"Man, he's _out_ ," Barry laughed. "I didn't think he drank that much."

"He really didn't. I think that's just his body throwing in the towel for awhile."

He looked up at her from his crouched position. "Do you know why he hasn't been sleeping? I thought it was this whole thing - you, and the implant, and you know, you. But it's gotten so much better lately and he still looks like an unmade bed half the time."

"Yes," she said carefully.

When she didn't go on, he said, "And you're not going to tell me, are you?"

"It's not mine to tell."

He nodded a little, scooped up Iris, and said, "I'll see you tomorrow, okay?"


	20. Chapter 20

(A/N) There's another sexy scene at the end of this one, and it goes rather more in depth. If you don't want to read that stuff, just click out once they start making out in earnest.

* * *

Caitlin tried to sleep, but the piercing was just sore enough to keep her awake. The dull constant pain sent the cold sneaking through her veins in silken threads. Not much, but enough that a single light flickered intermittently at her wrist, even with the implant working away. She went to the pipeline and stretched out on her bed there, in the cell, hoping the warmth and the dullness of the walls and the sheer familiarity would help. It didn't.

It was warm and cozy and the blanket was the same, but - but -

She'd only been gone a few days. When had this cell become so _small_?

She got up and went to the cortex, where she looked at maps on a tablet, tracing her finger over states and borders, thinking. Eventually, she shut it off and took a pad of graph paper into the break room, curling up into the chair Iris had vacated.

He really was asleep, she thought, looking over at Cisco still stretched out on the couch, his face slack and peaceful. No dreams. She wondered what the alcohol had to do with that, and noted the thought down.

To the background of Cisco's slow, steady breathing and the occasional small snore, she made more notes, frowning in concentration. Eventually, her eyes drooped, and she folded her arms over the back of the chair and rested her cheek on them. Just a little while, she told herself. She'd just close her eyes for a little while and then she'd go to bed properly.

Some hours later, a low murmur intruded her warm dreams.

"No, it's - he'll help us out. I mean, of anyone anywhere, he gets it." A heavy sigh. " _Cabrones_. I can't believe - okay, yeah. What? No, she's out. Tomorrow's soon enough. Uh-huh. Uh-huh. Yeah. Okay. Yep. Thanks, Bare. And thank Joe, too. Yeah. Night." Then a muted beep, and he muttered, " _Pendejos_."

She opened her eyes. He was curled into the corner of the couch, the rest of the cushions spread with disorderly piles of paper.

"Who are the assholes?" she asked.

His head shot up. "Nobody," he said, too brightly. "Hey, sleepyhead. Did I wake you up? Sorry."

She sat up, stretching. Her spine popped and the piercing twinged. "Better I'm awake. That chair's not exactly made for optimal sleeping."

"Probably not," he agreed amiably, picking up a pad of graph paper much like her own.

He looked alert enough that he must have been awake and working for a little while already. Plus all that paper. She angled her head to see them and realized they were the articles on lucid dreaming. "So," she said.

"Don't look so smug."

"Me? I don't look smug."

"Do too."

She smiled at him. "I have thoughts."

"Of course you do." He smiled back. "Trade?"

They swapped pads. His turned out to be a numbered list, of what seemed to be the different universes that he'd glimpsed. "Why does it start with two?" she asked, lifting her head. "What's one?"

He twirled his finger in the air. "This one. Obviously." He held up her notes. "Brain waves," he said.

"Yes! Something measurable. I theorize that they'll be markedly different then regular dreams."

"You gonna stick me in an fMRI? I don't know that we can fit that in the cortex."

"An fMRI would be _perfect_ ," she said wistfully. "But to get started, I don't think you need to go that far. There's still an EEG machine in storage, right? From when Barry was in his coma? You should pull that out. Maybe establish some baselines if you actually manage to sleep without dreaming. If not, I'll have to pull up some standards - " She bit her lip. "Mmm. I'd much rather have yours. But I'm sure you'll get them eventually."

He frowned at her a little bit. "Yeah, probably."

She held his notepad out. "How long will it take you to finish the implant?"

He traded hers back. "Like, two more days? I have a couple of things I want to add now. Maybe three," he added conscientiously.

She scribbled herself another note. "That should be enough time to get started, at least." She looked up. "So. Are you going to tell me who nobody is now? And why Barry called at - " She checked her watch. "Three in the morning?"

"It's no big deal," he said.

She narrowed her eyes at him. "You're going to tell me tomorrow anyway. So why make me wait?"

"It's just, um. You remember how you had to leave the warehouse in a hurry? Back when we rescued Barry from the Snarts?"

"Because the police were on their way. Because I have warrants out for my arrest."

He smiled weakly. "It seems that the heads of some of the pharma companies you robbed watch the news. And some of them are headquartered in Central City, and they're used to weird shit by now, and it didn't take much to put together that the person who crumbled brick walls with ice or broke locks with cold might just be the same person who sucked down a five alarm fire. And they, uh, called the Chief of Police tonight, screaming bloody murder about those outstanding warrants."

She took it in, swallowing.

"Look, it's not critical." But his pen jittered against his paper. "Joe's going to play baffled cop and run them all in circles for awhile. I'm enlisting Ray."

"Ray Palmer," she said, remembering that she'd been attempting rob Palmer Pharmaceuticals the night he'd caught up with her. It felt so long ago. "Your buddy."

"Right. He's a rich white dude, he's one of their tribe. And our friend Felicity; she's the one who worked on our computers. Between the two of them, and us, we'll be able to figure something out." The pen jittered faster. "This isn't an emergency. We will make sure you're okay."

"Still, it's probably a good thing I'm not going to be here," she said quietly.

His pen spurted out of his fingers. "What?"

"As soon as you finish the final implant, I'm leaving Central City."

"You don't have to run from these people. We'll take care of it."

"It's not just that." She climbed out of the chair and cleared a space for herself on the couch, sweeping the articles together and stacking them on the floor before sitting down next to him. "Do you think I can stay at Star Labs forever? Sleeping on a futon in someone's old office and eating takeout?"

"Obviously not," he said. "I'm not saying that. But there's work to do here. I mean, what we did for you and what we're starting to do for me - we can do that for other metas. We can make something good out of this."

"I know. And I want to do that work. But before that, I have things I need to do."

"Like?"

"I want to see my parents. I want them to know I'm not just . . . gone. And I want to go to Coast City." Ronnie had grown up there. Now he was buried there.

"And what else?"

"I - " She swallowed. "I need to see what I can do with this. It's wildfire season in the west. And it'll be bad, because of the droughts. Maybe I can help. No. I _can_ help. I know it."

He looked away.

"And you know, Justin was born in Arizona. And Phillip in Oregon. I went to Vanessa's grave, but not to theirs."

At the names of the two men she had killed, he looked back at her.

"I need to figure out how I'm going to live with that."

"But," he said.

"Do you remember what you said to me earlier?"

"Get out of there, the structure's unsound?"

She wrinkled her nose at him. "You didn't say, don't go. You said, come back to me."

He made a helpless noise in his throat. "I've been saying that to you in one way or another ever since the explosion."

"Then let me say what I should have been saying all along. I will." She touched his face. "I'll come back to you."

He closed his eyes and let his head sag forward. She leaned in until their foreheads rested together. He sighed, and his breath fanned her face. "If these warrants didn't exist - "

"I would still be leaving. Just for a little while. Just until I've figured this out. But I would say the same thing. I'll come back to you."

"Just because I ask?"

She shook her head. "Because I need you."

He opened his eyes to meet hers. "Then I'll fix this," he said. "Some way. And I'll be waiting."

"And - and we have now. Right now. A little bit of time for us."

For an answer, he slid his hand behind her head and kissed her.

They kissed for long minutes, touching each other tentatively, then with increasing confidence as they learned new places on familiar bodies. His hand slid under her shirt and his knuckles skimmed up her ribs before he cupped her breast. She sighed and leaned into him, and he settled back on the couch, pulling her down with him. His hands moved down her back in long, warm strokes. She traced her finger over the soft skin just above his waistband, and his hips pressed up.

Suddenly, he jumped, and she pulled back. So far as she knew, she hadn't touched any particularly sensitive part. "What? Oh. Demon spring?"

"Yep," Cisco said, shifting carefully. "Maybe Bare's right and it really is time to let this couch die."

"Maybe. At the very least," she said, "it's time to move this somewhere else. With more space." She climbed off him and held out her hand. He smiled at her, with only a trace of sadness, and let her pull him up.

Fingers still woven together, they left the break room and cut through the cortex, heading for the office that had become Caitlin's de facto bedroom.

"Hey," he said, halfway there. "Wait. Gotta get something." He ducked into an office that had once belonged to the director of HR and now functioned as a storeroom for all the odds and ends that didn't properly go anywhere else. She stood in the doorway, watching him rustle through drawers. "Ha!" He held up a box of condoms. "Found these when we were cleaning out offices."

Her brows shot up. "In _here_?"

"I know, right?" he agreed, tugging her along. "I don't think I stopped giggling for a week."

"Are they still good?" she asked, opening the door

He checked the date stamped on the side. "Yep." He set them on the floor, kicked off his shoes, and climbed onto her bed, sitting on top of her covers. She crawled after him and into his lap, straddling him.

He wrapped his arms around her waist and nuzzled her. "Oh, hey, I remember this," he murmured against her neck.

"Right where we left off," she agreed.

Her shirt had a row of buttons down the front, and he undid them by touch as they kissed. His warm, callused palm smoothed over her stomach. She _hmmed_ into his mouth and felt him smile.

She put her hands under his shirt in return, sliding them up behind the silly slogan, over his stomach and up his chest. They took his shirt off together, and he tossed it across the room so it caught on the doorknob, swung briefly, and fell to the floor. She kissed the hollow of his throat and flicked her thumb over his nipple, and he shuddered, fingers tangling as he tried to undo her bra. "Shit," he breathed, trying again.

"You want help?" she asked, but didn't wait for his answer before reaching behind herself with one hand and undoing the clasp with a flick of her fingers.

" _How even do you do that_ ," he said, but started kissing her breasts, so she didn't figure he actually wanted an answer. Besides, she preferred to arch against him, running her fingers through his hair and sighing as pleasure darted through her body with every flick of his tongue and suckle of his lips.

She let her head fall back, and then said, "Ouch."

He looked up. "Sore?"

"A little. Just at the piercing site. It's all right as long as I don't put pressure on it."

He eased back to lie on the bed, pulling her over him so her breasts pressed into his chest. She braced herself on her elbows and they kissed more, licking into each other's mouths. He slid his hands down her back to cup her ass in both hands. "Mmmm," he breathed.

As his hardness pressed that spot between her legs, a needy noise escaped her throat. "Cisco," she gasped.

"Caitlin," he whispered back, and one hand slipped up to trace the skin above the waistband of her slacks, following around to her front. His fingers rested lightly on the button of her slacks, a question.

"Yes," she said, to whatever he had planned, she didn't care, as long as he kept touching her, kissing her, breathing her name.

He undid the button, pulled down the zipper. She had to climb off him to peel them off, wiggling them off her legs, kicking them over the side of the bed along with her underwear. He rolled so they lay face-to-face, on their sides. He ran his hand over her hip, down to her knee, then up her inner thigh to cup her.

"Please," she said. "Please."

His fingers parted her folds and slipped between, into where all her nerve endings seemed to have relocated. "Here?" he murmured against her throat, kissing her collarbone.

"Lower," she panted. "Almost - _yes._ Oh." She let her eyes slide closed as his finger flicked over her clit, sending lightning through her body. "Oh. Yes. That."

Two fingers, circling, and she pressed her hips into his touch, seeking more pressure. Between his mouth on her breasts and his hand between her legs, she was rapidly losing her mind. She made a noise of protest when his fingertips left her clit, but they slipped downward and, then, then, _in._ First one, and then when she moaned, the other, stretching her. The heel of his hand came to rest right where she needed it.

"Good?" he asked.

She whimpered and squeezed her thighs together to increase the pressure. "I'm not - not going to last much longer," she panted.

"Good," he said, and kissed her. She wrapped her arms around his neck and kissed him back, open-mouthed, while his hand rocked, and she began to whimper and pant into his mouth, begging, _please, God, oh God, Cisco, I can't, I can't - oh!_

She cracked open with a shriek, her orgasm pulsing through her, erasing every thought but this man who was touching her, kissing her, holding her as she arched against him.

When the last of the shocks subsided, she rested her forehead against his hair, panting. She felt like her bones and muscles had all been replaced with pudding, all sweetness and languor. "Mmm," was all she could say.

He slid his fingers out of her, making her shudder again. She opened her eyes and saw him sucking his fingers clean, and against all reason, electricity crackled through the post-orgasmic haze. He smiled at her around his fingers, and somehow, she was able to move enough to run her hand down his stomach and stroke him through his boxers and his pants. He was completely hard, and thicker than she would have expected with his build, and hot, so hot.

His eyes slid half-closed with pleasure. "Fuck," he moaned.

"Yes, that's the idea," she said, and he laughed breathlessly, dropping his head back on the pillows.

"Condoms," he said. "Where - "

"I'll get them." She rolled over and felt around on the floor for the box, while he wrestled out of the rest of his clothes. She was struggling to pull out a foil packet when his pants and boxers went sailing over her to hit the door. For some reason that struck her as hilarious, and she collapsed in laughter.

He wrapped his arms around her from behind. "Hey," he said, kissing her shoulder, her neck, her ear. "Hey, quit laughing, I take safe sex very seriously."

"Right, yes, I know," she said, and then he tickled her.

She managed to get control of herself enough to retrieve the condom and hand it to him, even though a stray giggle or so snuck out. He opened the packet and put it on, grinning at her until she climbed on top of him. Then all laughter disappeared in a heated moan.

She leaned over, bracing her hands next to his head, so they could kiss, panting, groaning, while he guided himself into position. She sank down, gasping at the feel of him filling her.

"Oh, my god," he moaned, his fingertips sinking into her hips. "Oh, god. You feel so good."

"You make me feel good," she managed, and he looked up at her with so many things filling his eyes that she closed her own and leaned down to kiss him.

But, god, he did feel good, he felt amazing, all of this, and she couldn't talk anymore, not and make sense. But he made up for it, muttering against her skin as they fell into a rhythm of rocking and thrusting, hungry kisses, greedy hands. _So good, so good, Caitlin, you're so tight, mmmmmmm, God, yes,_ tocame alli, _yes, harder, like that. God. Yeah. Faster? Where? Oh, wow, fuck, oh, that's good, that's yes, yes, mm,_ fantastico, quiero estar aqui para siempre, _Caitlin, ah, I want to be inside you forever._

But forever couldn't happen, because she was teetering on the brink again, and his breath was coming faster, deep, guttural grunts overtaking words in Spanish or in English. She tried to kiss him and got his chin, his nose, and then, off-center, his lips, and he kissed her back as every muscle in her body went tight and then released all at once in a cry. She was draped across his chest, trembling through the last of it when he buried his face in her hair and went rigid all over.

She stroked his shoulders and his hair, kissing him, until he relaxed, with an uneven sigh. "Oh, my god," he murmured.

"I - yeah."

After they'd both cleaned up, he crawled back into bed next to her. She rolled over and snuggled into him. His arm came around her. "Hey," he said, sounding surprised and pleased.

"Hey," she said, smiling at him.

The blankets had all been shoved to one side. He reached over and pulled them up around the two of them, wrapping them up in a thick, warm cave. She said, "You're staying?"

"Yeah. I don't want to waste any of the time we have."

She pulled him close.

He kissed her deeply. "You okay?"

She considered it, with her forehead touching his. "Yes," she said.

This - the first time after the explosion, after her self-imposed exile, after Ronnie - it felt as if it should be fraught. Not to mention that their time together was a finite resource, with no guarantee of when that might change. She should be swirling with emotion. That might come later, but right now, she was with Cisco, warm and safe and loved.

She didn't try to explain but maybe he had worked some of that out himself, because he tucked her hair behind her ear and kissed her again. "Okay."


	21. Chapter 21

She woke to a thud, and Barry's voice saying, "Ow!" out in the corridor, followed by a whisper-shouted, "I'm okay! I'm fine! I'm going to work byyyyyyyye . . . " His voice Dopplered off into the distance.

She looked at Cisco quizzically.

He was all scrunched up, snorts of laughter escaping between his fingers. Once he got control of himself, he explained, "I asked him to bring me some stuff from my place. Enough for a few days. I mean, the whole street's a mess, probably, and I'd rather be here anyway."

"Okay," she said, kissing him for the last part of the sentence.

"So, he, um, came running in here and then realized you were naked under there and immediately shut his eyes."

Normally Caitlin would have been appalled by the notion that Barry might have caught even a glimpse of her nudity, but she _was_ naked under all the blankets. And so was Cisco. She began running her hands over his chest, saying absently, "Well, that was very nice of him, I'm sure."

"Yeah, but he still had his eyes shut when he left."

She paused, with her hand resting on his stomach. "Did he overload on Looney Tunes as a child, or what?"

"No way to be sure," he said. "But I think he was flustered. He hasn't done something like that in a long time. When he first woke up, man, we had dents all over the place. I got real good at patching drywall."

"I'm sorry I missed it."

"You _so_ are." He kissed her lips, then trailed a line of kisses across her cheek, down her neck, to her breasts. He paused there for a good long while, but eventually continued down her stomach. She pushed herself up on her elbows to see what he was doing.

After a moment, she dropped back against the pillow with a shuddering moan.

They did spend some time out of bed, him working on her final implant and her researching dreaming and brain waves as thoroughly as possible. She dug out the EEG, hooked it up, tested it. He converted the sensors to wireless ones so he wouldn't strangle himself or her as they slept. She established a baseline, non-dreaming, non-traveling, that he could compare brain waves to.

When he dreamed, he woke up and wrote down everything he could remember in bullet-pointed lists headed with the number of the universe he'd dreamed into, his brows crinkled together.

"How do you know this was seven?" she asked him on the second night, propping her chin on his shoulder. She often woke when he did, although now that he'd stopped fighting them, his wakings weren't nearly as violent as they'd once been. "You didn't see the same people. Or the same place, even."

He considered. "Something about the light," he said. "Does that make sense?"

"Light is a function of frequency," she murmured. "Maybe the frequency of these universes distorts the visual field."

"Or maybe because I'm dreaming," he said.

"Not incompatible." She kissed his neck and he tossed the notepad onto the bedside table and slid his arms around her waist.

Just before noon on the fourth day (taking frequent sex and nap breaks had slowed down his production), he said, "It's done."

She lifted her head from the latest EEG readings, blinking. "It is?" She came and stood next to him, studying the final implant and the two accessories that went with it.

"Well," he said finally. "Should we - ?"

She nodded and reached back to peel the tester off her back.

When the implant clicked into place, she felt a thread of warmth trickle down her spine. At his direction, she rolled her shoulders, stretched her arms, twisting and moving every which way to check the comfort. It was so small, and the piercing was healing so well, that she didn't think there would be an issue, but Cisco was through by nature.

When he was satisfied with that, he handed her the two cuffs, made of the same flexible leathery polymer as Barry's suit, but in a mix of blues and greens, with some metal plates along the inner band. The one on her left wrist was wide, with a black glass screen set into it. When she fastened it, the screen lit up and showed her core temperature. She watched it tick up to thirty-seven degrees and stop.

"Try readjusting the set point."

This had been Cisco's answer to her request. As usual with him, it had been more thorough and flexible than she'd considered possible. A lower set point for the implant would allow her to use some of her powers as her body tried to make up for the heat it wasn't getting. The lower it went, the more and faster she could access them. But of course, that also meant there was more danger to bystanders.

She lowered it to 35. Her heat sense faded into awareness. She said quietly, "Cisco, take two steps back, please."

He did, and she lowered it to 25. She felt as if she could see the heat leaving her.

But it was leaving slowly, at the speed of entropy. She lifted her right wrist, with the narrower cuff. No readout, no lights, just two buttons, one on either side of the band. With her thumb and forefinger, she pressed both in at the same time.

A shock jolted up her arm, and she jumped.

Cisco jumped, too. "Too much?"

"No," she said.

It was deliberately mild, not even a hundred volts, by her own design. But even that mild pain was enough to trigger a flare, the cold lifting its head like a dog from a nap. Her heat sense sharpened, spreading out beyond the cortex. She opened her hand and watched mist gather around it. She bit her lip and concentrated, and with aching slowness, an ice dagger formed out of the air, settling into her palm.

She closed her hand around it, breathing in.

The edge glittered razor sharp. She knew what she could do with this. She knew what she could do with all of it.

She lifted her eyes and met Cisco's. He stared at the ice dagger, but not with fear or wariness - with wonder.

She climbed off the table, walked over to the sink, and dropped it in. Still standing at the sink, she turned her set point back up. Warmth began to trickle down her spine again. She waited until it had gone back up to 37, with the help of a mug of tea and a hand warmer, to turn back and go to Cisco.

He pulled her close when she put her arms around him. "I wish it hadn't worked," he said into her hair. "I wish I needed to work on it more."

"If you really, really wished that, it wouldn't have," she said.

His arms tightened, and he sighed.

* * *

That night, they made love gently, touching each other everywhere, quiet and tender. They dozed and woke and kissed and touched again, over and over.

They didn't talk.

It must have been three or four in the morning when Caitlin finally fell truly asleep. When she woke, the sun streamed in the high, small window and she was alone. She pushed the covers aside and climbed out of bed, feeling around for her clothes. She'd packed her bag the night before and left out only her traveling outfit.

She dressed and did her hair and makeup, half wondering where Cisco was and half grateful that she got this quiet time to prepare herself for leaving.

He met her in the corridor, and paused to look her up and down. Over the past few days, she'd spent most of her time in jeans and t-shirts and hoodies, half of them borrowed from him. He said, "You look nice, Caitlin."

"Thank you," she said. She was wearing high heels, slacks, and a pale blue sweater. It was the kind of thing she would have worn to work at Star Labs, before. Sleek, professional, no-nonsense.

His green hoodie was folded at the bottom of her bag, along with a t-shirt that said, "Want results? Try the scientific method."

He was holding a phone, but it wasn't his. "This is for you," he said, handing it to her. "It's off the grid."

She turned it over in her hands. "Cisco," she said helplessly.

"Look," he said. "You have to go, I know that. And you've got, like, stuff to work through. I'm just saying, don't cut me out again."

"I -"

"I get the whole instinct to go Bruce Banner, wandering the world, but you know what? Historically, the lone wolf thing has not been awesome for either one of us."

"Cisco," she said again.

"Stay in touch. And not just with me." He pointed. "Barry's and Iris's numbers are already in there. I'm not asking for much, okay? Just, like, a text to let me know you're okay. How you're doing. Maybe pictures."

She reached out and put her hand over his mouth. "Would you let me say thank you?"

He nodded.

She moved her hand, but only to stroke his cheek. "Thank you. I was going to buy a prepaid phone at the train station, but this - this is much better."

"You're welcome." He put his hand over hers, and hesitated.

"Heyyyyy, where are you guys?" Barry yelled from the cortex.

"Perfect timing as usual," Cisco muttered, and dropped her hand.

She followed him to the cortex, where both Barry and Iris waited. Iris was already looking teary-eyed. "I can't stay long, I'm already late for work, but I had to come and say goodbye." She held out her arms, and Caitlin gave her the hug that the gesture asked for.

"I don't like this," Iris said fretfully, holding her close for a minute before letting go. "Why do you have to go? This warrant thing, we're going to fix it."

"I need to. I just do."

Iris sighed. "Okay. Well. Stay in touch, please?"

"Cisco gave me a - "

Iris smiled. "I know, he gave us the number. Oh! I brought this." She picked up the bag next to her feet. "It's for you. Obviously."

Caitlin took it, frowning at the weight. She opened it up and pulled out a beautiful white peacoat in boiled wool. "Oh my god!"

It wasn't quite the coat she'd lost to the heat gun. It was shorter, knee length, and the stark whiteness was lessened by the leaves and flowers embroidered at the collar and around the buttonholes. But when she pulled it on, it fit so well that it might have been made for her, and when she turned in place, the hem flared out with a satisfactory weight.

"Iris, this must have been so expensive. I couldn't." But Caitlin stroked the wool, biting her lip at the softness. And so _warm._

"Goodwill," Iris said. "I promise. You know the store on 22nd and Forester?"

"Oh, I like that one."

"I know, they have good stuff, right? That was fifteen dollars. I swear. Please take it. You look amazing and winter's coming."

"Okay," Caitlin said, fastening the buttons.

Iris gave Barry a quick good-bye hug, and Cisco a longer one, murmuring something in his ear. When she let him go, she turned back to Caitlin, her eyes shiny.

Caitlin gave Iris another hug. "I'm so glad you were our driver."

"I'm so glad you were the hired muscle."

They grinned at each other, and Iris sniffled. "Okay," she said, pulling away. "I - I have to go. Be okay, Caitlin."

"I'm trying."

When she'd left, Barry asked, "So, when's your train?"

"In about an hour."

"Do you need a lift to the station or anything?"

"I've actually arranged for a cab." She'd felt the need, because she didn't to cry in front of Cisco, and she didn't want to cry on the train around other travelers, and at least in a cab, she would have the luxury of a pane of glass between herself and the driver, who would be hopefully uninterested in anything but a fare. "They're meeting me out front in a few minutes."

Barry looked from her to Cisco, but didn't say anything. "Can I carry your bag?"

She could carry her own bag. It wasn't very heavy, and she'd carried two, heavier than that, into Star Labs when she'd first arrived. "Yes, please," she said, smiling at him.

The cortex to the elevator, the elevator to the front doors, out across the parking lot, to the gate.

Cisco unlatched it and Barry set her bag down on the sidewalk outside. They all stood around it, quiet and awkward.

"You've got my number," Barry said to her.

"Mhm."

"Okay. So, if there's ever anything I can help out with - anything I can do. You just shoot me a text. I'll be there."

"In a flash?"

"Hey," he said, pretending offense. "That's my super-suave line."

They all snickered, then fell silent again.

Barry shuffled from foot to foot, and then said brightly, "You know what? You know what we've never done? Checked the mailbox. There's a mailbox for Star Labs, right? I'm going to check the mail. I bet you there's, like, pizza coupons forever. Yeah. Okay, I'm gonna go do that." He ambled off, slow even for a regular person.

They watched him go. Caitlin found herself biting her lip to hold in the giggles.

Cisco put his arms out. "Central City, I give you your super-suave superhero."

The giggles escaped.

He laughed too and put his arms down. "I - "

She put her arms around him and buried her face in his hair. His arms came around her, tight, his hand fisted in her shirt. They held each other for several silent minutes, breathing jerkily. After a few minutes, he shifted enough to rest his forehead against hers.

"I gotta - I gotta tell you something. Caitlin. I love you."

She closed her eyes. "I - "

"You don't have to say it back, I just wanted you to know."

"I know. I - " Her breath caught in her chest. "I love you too."

It was the first time she'd said it to anyone since Ronnie had died, and it hurt like something cracking open in her chest. But it also felt like the truest thing she'd ever said.

His arms tightened around her. "Come back to me," he said in her ear.

"I will."

* * *

The cab rolled off down the street and Cisco stuck his hands in his pockets and turned back inside the gate before it had turned the corner. His heart felt like a peeled apple, more prone to bruising than ever.

 _She loves you,_ he reminded himself and wondered why that didn't seem to help.

Barry followed him, silent.

"Hey, dude, can you do me a favor?"

"Sure."

"I've got some equipment inside that I want to take home. Help me get it out to my car?"

"Yeah, sure, no problem. You gonna be here?"

"No, I'm going home right now." His place needed cleaning. Hell, his place needed an exhumation. He looked forward to that, the mindlessness of dusting and vacuuming and cleaning out the scary-ass refrigerator so he wouldn't think of how empty Star Labs was.

He'd packed his bag too, the one Barry had brought here a few days ago. He slung it over his shoulder and packed another bag full of wires and cords that went along with the EEG machine. Barry took the machine itself, staggering along behind Cisco as they wended their way through the corridors again even though he could have zipped it out and been back in a second flat.

They loaded it into the trunk of his car, Cisco steadfastly not looking in the direction Caitlin had gone.

"What's this for, anyway?" Barry asked, shaking out his fingers.

"Long story," Cisco said. It was the perfect opening. It was. He didn't take it.

"You going to be okay?" Barry said.

"Mmmm," Cisco said. Not an answer.

"She'll be back."

"I know. She said she would." Cisco shoved his trunk closed and leaned on it until it latched. Then he straightened up and stuffed his hands in his pockets. It was chilly, he realized, and almost looked around for Caitlin before remembering that it was practically October and winter was coming and - would she be okay? With winter?

He shut his eyes. He knew she'd be okay. He'd built the thing that would make winter okay for her. Anyway, she was going west where there was plenty of heat. There might be days where the implant didn't have to work so much as a degree.

"Cisco?" Barry asked, and Cisco knew he was avoiding the other thing he'd planned to do.

He swiveled. "So. Um. I've got to tell you something."

"What is it?"

"Before the - before you - " Cisco swallowed. "Before Eddie died. Thawne told me something. I didn't tell you, then. I wanna tell you now."

Barry's shoulders went tight. "Okay," he said, clearly swimming in dread.

"Not about you. About me." Cisco closed his eyes momentarily and felt the skin between worlds stretch thin. Every Cisco with these powers had this moment, even if it wasn't right now. Telling Barry Allen what he was. "Thawne . . . told me something about me."


	22. Chapter 22

Cisco paid for the vintage comic book and paused to take a selfie with it before putting it away. He sent the picture to Caitlin, with _Farmer's market score!_

He put his phone away without waiting for an answer, because she didn't always answer right away. Sometimes she was too busy, and sometimes she was in places without cell reception at all. Once he'd gone four days without hearing back from her, and was getting worried enough to start scouring the web for mentions of some freak cold-related accident, when she'd texted, **Sorry sorry sorry NO RECEPTION ugh what the actual hell.** She'd been in northern Arizona, and apparently cell reception was spotty at best.

He'd had to put his head down on his workstation for a good five minutes, hyperventilating with relief, before he felt able to say, _Thx gud 2 know_ and _how was it?_

 **Bad** she'd said.

He'd read the word a few times over, wishing he could hug her. He'd said that before he could talk himself out of it, and she'd said, **Me too.**

She used her phone to upload the stats from her implant to a cloud server very regularly, so he could check on how it was going. So far, their design was holding up. They'd texted a few times a week since she left. Most often pictures of where she was, or little bits of chatter from him about the newest metas in the city or some new piece of tech he was working on. Anybody reading it would have been bored to death.

Once, he had texted her, _Drnk & hrny, u?_ and she'd called him back, and they'd had a phone sex marathon, interspersed with a lot of ridiculous pillow talk.

He hadn't actually been that drunk, but thought it was a good excuse for trying.

At the beginning, he'd had to stop himself from texting, _I miss u I miss u I miss u_ every day, because he didn't want her to feel like he was pressuring her to come back. Then she'd sent him a picture of Ronnie's grave, and said, **I wish you were here** and he'd felt like he could say, _I do 2_

It was nice, where they'd buried him. All green, with trees, and the ocean glittering hazily in the distance. The stone was simple and it had some quote on it, something poetic-sounding that was completely out of character for Ronnie.

But Caitlin had said, **It was a deep, dark secret, but he loved poetry.**

 _He did?_

 **We'd been dating for six months before I figured it out. I think he thought it was too unmanly, or too imaginative, for an engineer. I always thought that once he got older it would stop mattering what people thought and he could geek out over Mary Oliver as openly as he did over Stephen Hawking.**

Cisco bought a book of poetry and tried to read it, and super-duper didn't get it. Maybe Ronnie could have explained it, he thought, and missed his friend so badly for about three days that it was kind of a relief that Caitlin was missing him too and they could talk about it together.

She also texted with Iris and Barry, which he knew because they always made a point to tell him that they'd heard from her and that she was fine. Even Luci had gotten a couple of texts, which she'd showed him when he went over to her and her boyfriend's place to play Risk one evening. "She's healing really well," Luci had said, studying the picture that Caitlin had sent of the piercing site.

"Yeah, I think she is," he'd said.

"She is in California, right? Helping with the wildfires?"

Cisco smiled. "Yes."

"That's rough," Brian had said when Luci got up to get a refill. He was a giant, with arms about the size of Cisco's thighs, and scarred and pierced and tatted up on top of it. He looked like he ate live kittens for breakfast. He adored Luci and his mom and his six-year-old daughter and his job as a youth counselor, and he was a nerd down to his core. Cisco and Barry had dragged him to the nearest Geeks Who Drink night and he'd been their ringer. It had been _awesome_.

"You worry about her? At those fires?"

"All the time," Cisco said quietly.

"Yeah," Brian said, looking over at Luci.

As dangerous as the fires sounded, it helped her to help others. He could hear in her voice when they talked, and read in her texts. She sounded better. More content. More at peace.

He also read the news reports of the astonishing luck that firefighters were having, keeping it away from houses and towns. No mention of a miraculous fire-eating woman, although any news story written by someone in Central City threw out the possibility of Killer Frost going out there to help, with a kind of proprietary pride.

He was almost okay with the name now. It was her name; she'd chosen to keep it. He tried not to feel guilty about the way he'd given it to her.

Ray and Felicity had come through, along with Iris writing editorials about metahuman service to the city. The last of the charges had been dropped as of last week, crushed under the sledgehammers of money and power and computer chicanery and public opinion.

"Hey," Ray had said on their last Skype session. "So I was talking to my head of R&D for Palmer Pharm, and I think you guys should put your heads together."

"Yeah, why?" Cisco had asked, furrowing his brow over a problem in Ray's Atom suit.

"He wants to create some kind of universal drug therapy that will suppress meta powers. People could use it if they'd rather be normal, or it could be part of sentencing - Cisco?"

Cisco was gone, sucked under into a nightmare timeline that he'd never seen before, filled with metas who'd had all their humanity stripped away. Only the powers were left, so they'd become tools for evil men to slaughter and subjugate the powerless.

"Cisco?" Ray called out.

He blinked hard, dragging himself out of the vision to see his friend looking at him with concern through the computer screen. " _That would not be a good idea_ ," he said hoarsely.

Ray stared at him, mouth slightly open. He knew about the visions, because Cisco had told him, too, but he'd never seen one grab him before. He closed his mouth, swallowed, and said, "Okay. Gotcha. I'll kill it."

Cisco nodded his thanks, wiping sweat away.

The visions didn't usually snatch him like that, in his waking hours. He'd managed to get control of them in his dreams, able to yank himself out if it got bad, and even starting to have some success choosing where to go when he dreamed. But when something happened, or started to happen, that pushed two worlds too close to each other, that other world tended to slam into his cerebral cortex.

He should start working on that next.

He wasn't thinking about that right now, though. He was putting all his efforts into enjoying the day, balanced on the knife edge between fall and winter.

He meandered through the farmer's market, pausing to glance at stalls every so often. There was one stall with fairly bad paintings, including one of the Flash, so broad-shouldered and lantern-jawed that it was pretty clear the artist had never seen him for real. Cisco thought about snapping a picture and sending it to Barry, but he just smiled at the artist. Poor dude couldn't help it, seriously, nobody ever got to see Barry up close and personal except bad guys and cops and Star Labs.

Which included Iris now, on a regular basis, as well as some slow, careful testing on metas who'd contacted her, asking for help after she'd said in her blog, _Maybe there's a place where people like this can go._

Caitlin had gotten on Skype a few times, talking through some particularly thorny problem, suggesting some course of treatment. The metas, listening, had all seemed to realize that this was Killer Frost, and looked at the computer screen with as much awe as they'd looked at the Flash. More. The Flash had always been a hero. Killer Frost was someone who'd transformed into one - someone who'd wrestled her powers into submission, turned them into something good.

The air was chilly but the sun leavened some of it. He tucked his hands into his pockets and breathed in. There was a Central City out there, where all this was ash and tatters, where the particle accelerator explosion had been much, _much_ worse.

His stomach grumbled, and he found the food trucks, all parked around the edge of a public square. He bought a banh mi and sat on the edge of the fountain in the middle of the square to eat it.

And then there was the other thing.

It had started with being able to control volume, dialing things up if he couldn't hear, down if there was too much. He realized he'd been doing it without thinking for awhile. Waveforms, they'd decided after testing. He could vibrate the air, and other materials. Barry theorized that sonic booms might be a possibility once Cisco trained up to some real power, which would probably happen fast because the more he did it the stronger they got, like lifting weights. _Sonic booms yeaaahhh buddy!_

When he'd told her, Caitlin had just about blown up his phone firing off text after text. He'd finally just uploaded all the testing data to the same cloud server that she used, and then she'd really gotten excited. Seriously, his phone may have started smoking, just a little.

Iris had dissolved in giggles when Cisco had said, "Wow, she's really into this."

Barry and Cisco had said, "What?" several times until she told them, "She's just found out her lover can _vibrate._ She is absolutely into this."

Barry's eyes had widened, and he'd gone very quiet.

For his part, Cisco had walked around Star Labs for about the next three hours with a dumb grin on his face. Her _lover._

But it meant he missed her more than ever.

He checked his phone, even though he'd told himself he wouldn't. She'd been quiet since the day before. He kept hoping she'd send him something that said **I'm coming home** now that the charges were dropped and the wildfire season seemed to be done with. But, nothing.

He tucked his phone back in his pocket and decided to work on some accuracy. Focusing on a penny on the cement floor of the fountain, he flicked his finger, and the water above it splooshed as if something had hit it. He grinned and did it again.

Flick

 _Sploosh._

Flick.

 _Sploosh._

Flick

 _Crack._

His hand went still.

The surface of the water had gone solid, except for the spot where his shot had shattered a hole in the thin sheet of ice that had formed. His heart hurled itself against his ribs. He got to his feet and turned around, scanning the crowd. He stopped, smiled, and opened his arms.

Caitlin walked into them.

FINIS


End file.
